Wednesday 18 January 2017

More old Ramsgate fishing smack pictures and the complicated art of commenting on blogger.

The internet is a funny old place, it seems impossible now that only a very few years ago nearly all of the comment happened on the local blogs and that open and anonymous comment was the norm.

Nowadays the vast majority of local comment seems to happen on the local Facebook groups, on the plus side it is possible to moderate comment on these groups by excluding commentators. A difficult job for group administrators, but not impossible as it became on blogger.

The problems with Facebook though are different one being it handles images very differently to blogger making it difficult to view larger images and difficult to publish a lot straight from your phone. Another problem is that the google search engine seems to be blind to Facebook and the search Facebook box, well just try putting in, Ramsgate fishing smack. 

So with yesterday’s blog post most of the comment wound up here https://www.facebook.com/groups/516220578418850/permalink/1482897158417849/ but of course you can only see it if you are a member of We Love Ramsgate Facebook group.

It’s all rather difficult and honestly I don’t know what the solution is, the crux of the problem is that the law is very vague about where the responsibility for third party comment lies.

On to the pictures of the Ramsgate fishing industry around 1900

 I think what is going on here is a process called tanning the sails, my guess is some sort of concoction containing linseed oil and probably ochre giving the distinctive yellow brown colour. I think the idea is to preserve the cotton sails for as long as possible.



And finally the books that went out in my bookshop today http://michaelsbookshop.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/phantoms-in-bookshop.html



1 comment:

  1. Hi Michael good to see that you are still blogging I myself have not bothered for some time one of the reasons being the problem of rich people and greedy lawyers happy to restrict open debate with spurious defamation proceedings however for what it is worth my view is that I in common with everyone else will press the button that says publish and assume that that makes me liable unless of course the comment is moderated which case I would assume the moderator would assume was some of the liability for the comment.

    Still it's a real pity that so few people continue to blog particularly if you look at the state of local newspapers

    ReplyDelete

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.