Appy Olympic New Year, Pinch and a Punch a first of the Month look at the Thanet Blogs and blogging.

The new thing for me this year is the improvement of mobile phones to the point where I can blog anywhere quickly easily and with pictures.

The good thing about this is that the equipment is small enough to carry around with me all the time. The bad thing about this is the equipment is small.

Time to turn out my pockets, the contents allow me to draw, paint, take reasonable photographs, type text with large sausage like fingers and publish drawings, paintings, photographs and text to the internet, where the whole world can access it.

It is only recently that this has all come together in a manageable and affordable way, the ongoing cost is mobile internet access which added on to a pay as you go phone is £20 for 6 months.

The largest item is the sketchbook and if I have to look presentable I use a smaller one. To me this is a culmination of technology that has been developing during my lifetime and in terms of the gear you carry around with you to communicate with the rest of the world, I don’t think it can be improved upon a lot.

Unfolded it looks like this.

With the blogs, well things have changed over the last year on the Thanet blogging front, but the reading audience has grown steadily. Here is the link to December referral statistics, note new boys e.g. Will Scobie didn’t have a link to this blog for the whole month, so his statistics are not representative of his popularity http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/laptop112/

Back to the new technology of blogging and the internet.

I suppose it would be true to say this goes back at least to Turners time, in the early 1700s he organised his painting and drawing equipment to fit in his pockets.

The mobile internet world of apps and touchscreens presents certain problems as it is mostly aimed at the consumer and it seems to be intended that anything the consumer adds to internet in terms of text will be very small.

Now I like to drivel on a considerable amount and at the moment this means I need a proper full sized keyboard, the latest addition to my kit being a folding one of these.   

I am not going down the road that Clive Hart and Simon Moores and most recently Alan Poole have floundered in and frankly an ipad would be both too big and too expensive for my pocket.


If I am going to carry around a mandbag it has to be a full-sized laptop. The thing that does truly amaze me is the movement from a keyboard with a conventional spellchecker to this ghastly thing called predictive text. In other words the computer guesses the word you want to write and writes it, making you look a total plonkner. 

I will ramble on about this inbetween the other things I am doing today.