Friday Ramble

 Market day in Ramsgate today and with the sunshine the town is busy as is my bookshop, so this will probably be a bit disjointed.

I will start with a bit of moan about the council’s IT as I have posted about it twice this week. The thing that annoys me here is that we are paying for the council to provide a service and part of that service is run badly.

The council’s Facebook wall is a prime example of this, see http://www.facebook.com/pages/Thanet-District-Council/83700846372?sk=wall I posted about this earlier in the week, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/10/thanet-district-councils-facebook.html

This is still showing an out of date press release and a link to song on YouTube saying how awful Thanet is, what a disaster the Turner Contemporary is and so on. Funny yes, something that the council should have achieved, no.

Most older children manage their Facebook settings so that the public can see what they want them to see on their Facebook wall and not what anyone chooses to put there.

Same with the way the council are promoting local events, now the council have tagged their own website and the tourism website they pay someone else to run for them with “what’s on in Thanet” so if you bung the question into a search engine, as someone outside Thanet these are the two trusted sites that come up. With a major event on this weekend you would expect one or the other of these sites to tell that it was on. See http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/2011/10/ramsgate-beach-cross-and-whats-on-in.html

 Looking at the other local blogs, this offering from The Turner Contemporary interested me http://www.turnercontemporary.org/blog/learning/blank-canvas-by-lucy-steggals-lead-artist-and-laura-probert-participant/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+turnercontemporary-blog+%28Turner+Contemporary+Blog%29

With the local history books that I publish I do a fair bit of printing and using a steamroller isn’t something that has occurred to me.

Something else gallery related that I haven’t touched on before is the rather slow and complicated way that Margate lifeboat is now launched. Perhaps this could be the subject of a ponderous work of art.

While the art exhibition that is now on in the Turner Contemporary is very good I do wonder about the quality and significance of some of the galley’s other activities, once again this is a matter of public funding, something I suppose we should all keep an eye on.

Councillor Simon Moores has recently visited the gallery and concurs with me that the current exhibition is well worth a visit see http://birchington.blogspot.com/2011/10/birds-eye-view.html 

This is also confirmed by Tripadvisor where the latest review is a good one, see http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g503912-d310794-Reviews-Turner_Contemporary-Margate_Kent_England.html

This sort of travel review site is having an increasing influence on where people go and hence where they spend their money, with tripadvisor now linked to Facebook it is easy to see how important the council’s use of Facebook is.

Bignews Margate is another influential local blog that I read and being in Margate Tony’s coverage of the Arlington House issue especially interesting, see http://bignewsmargate.blogspot.com/2011/10/politicians-ought-to-do-less.html

Here in Ramsgate the damage to the town done by Tesco is still evident, they built a large supermarket in the town which had an adverse effect on the existing local shops and then they moved out of town. Why they plan a large supermarket in Margate is a bit unclear, but if it gets built, experience suggests this may cause damage to the town.

I gather that work has started on the new Margate sea defences, I though the internet would be bristling with photos of this work but can’t find much. Correction I am wrong about this they haven’t started work on them yet.

On to today’s paper, too busy to go out to get it but I did look at the articles online and noted this one http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Teenaged-mum-evicted-parties-hell/story-13622347-detail/story.html the part that struck me is that the end result is a problem tenant in Ramsgate becomes a problem tenant in Ciftonville.

Back to the subject of council bashing where I seem to be getting a certain amount of flack, I should point out that my thoughts on the council’s Facebook wall and promotion of events, something that cost all of us who are trying to run businesses in Thanet dearly are intended to try and make them improve the situation.

The net result of previous posts on this subject seem to have resulted in the council stopping promoting local events on their website homepage at all, apart from that is, well today it is: St. Laurence Churchyard Tour (extra October tour)Band Concert - Birchington Silver BandSt. Laurence Church Tour (November)St. Laurence Church Coffee Morning & Plant SaleLeonardo da Vinci at the Court of Milan.St. Laurence Church Tour (December)Wonder Workers and the Art of Illusion.St. Laurence Church Tour (January)The Book of KellsSt. Laurence Church Tour (February)

I am wondering why they seem to have an obsession with giving such a high priority to coffee mornings and plant sales, while completely ignoring important local events, anyone got any ideas?

So a message here to the guys and gals at Cecil Square, we need your Facebook presence, particularly now it is linked to Tripadvisor, so don’t just delete it, put something positive there about the good things happening in Thanet.

Yep your zip is undone, this is easily fixed by moderating who can write on your wall, not I repeat not who can look at your wall and please consider that this may not be the best place to publicise benefit cheats and licensing fraudsters, much better to promote the exhibition at the Turner Contemporary and the beach cross there.

While you are at it, you may wish to consider the council’s twitter presence, see http://twitter.com/#!/ThanetCouncil perhaps you could tweet a few positive things there.

There is also the council’s Youtube presence http://www.youtube.com/user/ThanetCouncil nothing since the video showing the inside of one of our derelict buildings since you bunged it up about seven weeks ago.

One way or another you may wish to question who it is that is using internet social media to bash Thanet. 


Prize for the worst Thanet video goes to Turner Contemporary with this offering, don’t worry it is mercifully short and fortunately no one appears have watched it.       

Late Night Live: Noise 30.9.11 - Noise shop with Juneau projects from Turner Contemporary on Vimeo.

Up until this point I have always assumed that the constraint that has held modern music together is that the instruments have to be in tune. By this I mean something along the lines of, you may only like classical music but you would certainly know it if say an electric guitar was out of tune badly, or would you?

I may ramble on and hopefully read this and correct some of the errors.