Wednesday 5 March 2008

Reflections on blogs and blogging

After the recent battle of the blogs I have decided that it’s time to update the links to other blogs. First for those of you used to a daily dose of Simon Moores out goes Thanet Life and in goes Zentelligence at http://www.zentelligence.blogspot.com/ I also notice that Simon is now writing for the newspaper Your Thanet if you wish to read his views on local issues.

Next for those of you wishing to read Eastcliff Ricard will now find him at The Isle of Thanet Gazunder http://thegazunder.blogspot.com/ albeit a little bruised and not quite yet his old self. One is reminded here of the Nac Mac Feegles fear of lawyers.

Then the new kid on the blog is Bertie Biggles of Thanet Strife http://thanetstrife.blogspot.com/ which started as a parody of Thanet Life, but is now attracting some serious readers and comments.

I am also adding a link to Thanet Blog List recent feeds http://www.thanetbloglist.co.uk/?page_id=58 that is where you can keep up to date with all the new postings on the local blogs.

I realised during the events of the last few weeks that one should always think carefully before publishing a persons real name on the internet if what one is saying is in any sense controversial. Real people have real reputations and careers that can be damaged and the internet has a long memory (because of caches) so that if one subsequently wishes to retract what one has said it is not just a matter of deleting it.

Anonymity on the internet just doesn’t exist, so that anything one writes anonymously can be tracked back to the person who paid for the computer one is using to be connected to the internet.

A final thought about anonymity, if one posts anonymously without a blogger identity but just puts ones name to the post one could in fact be anyone. So that having a fictitious blogger identity is not, as it were as anonymous as just posting anonymously, sorry if I am being a bit abstruse here what I mean here is that when say Eastcliff Richard posted one always knew it was the same person or at least someone who knew his blogger password.

5 comments:

  1. I deleted an unhelpful anonymous comment but saved the ip address

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  2. Sounds like you have fallen for Moores' bullshit hook line and sinker.

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  3. Anonymous perhaps you should consider who benefits from making it more difficult for our local our politicians to communicate with us. Simon is considered such an important local figure that someone has gone to considerable time and effort to produce a parody blog of Thanet Life, parody of this quality is an accolade usually reserved for national leaders.

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  4. Without wishing to fan the smouldering embers of this ridiculous debacle any further, I would like to take exception to you singling out the erstwhile ECR blog for your 'fictitious blogger' tirade.

    Is your memory so short that you have forgotten OVIT's sentiments that Thanet Life had racist, xenophobic and homophobic overtones in his opinion? Or that Thanet Star published a rather ill-conceived, in my view, article entitled 'Is eCrime "expert" and Thanet Councilor, Dr Simon Moores, guilty of computer misuse, business fraud or gullibility?'

    Last year ECR removed personal details of someone from the blog at your request and you seemed more than happy that any caches on Google would disappear within a matter of days. Why the change of tune now?

    Similarly ECR received a threat of legal action from a local journalist last year, and was happy to make an apology and correction. No such approach has been forthcoming from Moores.

    Simon Moores has always been obsessed with discovering who ECR really is, pure and simple. He even went to the extraordinary lengths last year of telephoning a BBC journalist and pumping him for information about a contribution ECR made to the BBC Kent website. He was not alleging any defamation back then, but was purely on a fishing expedition. The same is true on this occasion if you ask me, but if you must make blinding accusations about anonymous blogs please bear in mind that Eastcliff Richard never was the only anonymous, anti-Moores blog in town and was by far the least serious.

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  5. Anonymous 11.59 there seems to be some confusion here, you seem to either think that I have written an anti Richard tirade, which however I look at doesn’t seem to be the case or in the cut and paste of computers your comment was meant for a different posting elsewhere.

    When one has written something that one thought made some sort of sense and someone who is obviously well informed and intelligent appears to have taken it to mean something completely different, it leaves one somewhat lost for words.

    Personally I have always found both Richard and Simon most helpful and courteous and in both cases I should like to see something like normal service resume.

    I never really did see ECR as a particularly anti Simon blog more that there was a difference of sense of humour between Simon and Richard which may of course be the case here.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.