Tesco is evil - that's the word from both the comments on the blog and the searches people have been making. Is this just a few disgruntled people sounding off however?

Is it Small Business vs Supermarkets?

We know that Tesco is not a true monopoly (yet) and so in that way can not be called evil. The Telegraph suggests that ostentatiously disapproving of mega-retail is regarded as an elementary social courtesy. In other words calling Tesco Evil is fashionable right now.

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» Continue Reading: Is TESCO evil?

The top 10 sources of traffic for Thanet Star over the last 3 months

1. bignewsmargate.blogspot.com
2. nakedinthanet.com
3. eastcliffrichard.blogspot.com
4. lordmatt.co.uk
5. google.com
6. thanetonline.blogspot.com
7. google.co.uk
8. inlineseo.com
9. facebook.com
10. seowhy.com

That last one is a forum in China and I am guessing that most anyone could take that spot next time I produce a list like this.

Is Clive's answer to Mark too smooth to be true or an honest public reply?

Since writing this last night I have seen that Clive has replied on this blog and everyone seems to be noting that he is offering to hand in his job over all this. I want to make it clear that the very last thing I want to see is a good politician (not that we have many) be lost because of the heat as the utter evil b****ds can take as much as can be dished up without blinking. I've tried to look beyond Clive's offer to resign and see what it all means. I am still lost as to what I should trust though as the actual evidence is in short supply. Maybe it is six of one half a dozen of the other?

Since I started to plan to write this post I have flip-flopped back and forth as to my reaction to Cllr Clive Hart's offer to stand down as leader of the Labour Party in reply to Mark Nottingham's comments.

My problem is that I don't trust politicians at all and have an even lower opinion of Thanet's lot. On the other hand I liked Clive on the few times that I met him. Clive has come the closest anyone has to getting me to sign up to a party and stand as a candidate. Sadly, however, I am still not a candidate nor a party member.

At first I think Bravo Clive (most honourable) and then I think that's not good Thanet might need you. Then I find myself wondering if this proves Clive is not in it for the money and should stay and then my cynical nature has me wonder if Clive is escaping after being called out by Mark. Then I wonder if Mark is just a nut case that Clive could well live without...

So I wonder if I should think that maybe this resignation is the action of a cowered and then I think maybe it is a brave action. Only later to find myself I thinking that it is the reaction of a man stretched by life just a little too far and with too much on his plate. Only to go full circle and wonder the whole lot again.

Maybe it is a little of some or all of those things?

I see a strong well written and clearly thought out rebuttal telling "Clive's side of the story" and then I wonder why he fails to address some of the accusations. Is it that Mark's post is too silly to talk about or has Mark hit a nerve?

Was there a little truth bending that could be embarrassing while Mark is over reacting? I know that candidates try to puff up their own importance and this might have caused a misfire in Marks passion for the job?

I can't tell if this is a genuine reply or extra smooth with a side helping of smooth and sprinklings of extra smooth smoothness on top. Both sides treating this whole thing as a public Freedom Of Information Request for all available facts and documents would help but I suspect that Clive is looking to make this a case of who-do-you-trust and who-has-the-best-history which does not help me see the truth.

Is Clive changing the subject or has Mark "lost it"?

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Labour: Smooth spin or honest response?

Google has been telling us that we bloggers might be boring

Yesterday I published a list of top search terms that people used to find Thanet Star in the last four months. The list had a few surprises in it but what was most telling was what was missing.

People looking for Thanet Star via Google is likely to always be the top search term and I am used to seeing at least one Cosmo search term in the list (there were two this time) but there was a single search that I did not expect and several that I did expect that were not there.

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» Continue Reading: What Google can tell us about the people of Thanet

Over the last quarter these are the search terms that have taken people to Thanet Star.

I've tried to link the keywords to the most relivant page on the site. (The one I think they were looking for or should have been).

1. thanet star
2. dentaline margate
3. cosmo margate
4. dentaline thanet
5. dentists in thanet
6. tesco evil
7. euroferries
8. thanet anthem (?)
9. the bracket margate
10. cosmo chinese margate

Thanet Labour have been accused of corrupt lack of transparency and bias in the selection of candidates scoring a spectacular own goal on the eve of the Thanet Council Election

Indeed Clive Hart the leader of the Labour party has been directly accused by a member of the Labour Party of being complicit in biased, unconstitutional selection which would be an act of gross hypocrisy in light of his strong statements in council.

Three goes the £1 I had riding on Labour for a clean win.

At the very least Labours leadership stands accused (here)of being less than transparent and not ensuring that due process as followed and that the truth was misplaced (or suppressed). In short the leadership has been called out for cheating. All at a level of slime and disgrace that we have had to endure from the Conservatives for so long.

Thanet Star put it to Clive Hart and a number of Labour members that being exposed may have brought the party's good name into disrepute and indeed undermined democracy in Thanet. There was no reply.

Therefore Clive and Co Thanet Star would like to challenge you to answer our question in public. Thanet does not need leadership that seeks to take advantage of others or to abuse the system for personal gain. We've had that for far too long. The Thanet Star is here let us see your evidence.

With both party's determined to show themselves up maybe this is the year that the Liberal Democrats take back some ground? After all in the Dane Valley by election Labour enjoyed a 1% up swing and took it more by default than anything else while Lib-Dem came from no-where to a close second. The message from the people of Thanet to the Political Parties is that we have had enough of this shit.

You might have noticed that Thanet Star vanished from the web for most of the weekend. This was due to some server issues which were made worse by the fact that the years invoice still has an outstanding balance. Normally I pay for my server up front at the start of the billing cycle. That's not possible any more (my having ended my business to go work in London for a while).

You might have also noticed that the total demand on the server for all of my sites is such that things can sometimes run slowly. This is a memory issue but the upgrade is too expensive for me just now and the yearly rent goes up with more kit in the rack. I am slowly taking sites off line but there are some like Thanet Star that I dearly want to keep live.

To do that I need your help.

To make sure that this does not cause a problem I am opening up to sponsorship in the form of a Blog Angels set up which is here the sponsor offers to donate a small amount monthly for a set period of time. In return each Angel company gets to put their logo on my site, gets reviewed if at all possible and gets a good mentioning on the blog. This content will remain even after the sponsorship ends.

I am specifically looking for four (4) local companies that would like to act as Angels for something independent with the result that they pick up some good brand exposure (in other words people find out about you).

I am looking for just £25 a month from each Angel and asking for a year's commitment although I'm open to other offers. Read more here.

The Gateway in Margate experienced an afternoon of down time and dishy firemen yesterday.

It seems a minor fire in TDCs offices at about lunchtime yesterday made life very hard for the workers in the gateway. Although the fire was quickly put out by the fire supression system fire services were on the scene and everyone got out safely.

In a side note the word from my sources tells a slightly different story from the BBC who have also reported this story. However this did not stop mentions of "diet coke" in direct reference to our emergency services being made. Clearly not everyone was having a bad time. The word on facebook is that the firemen were rather dishy but the loss of use of all computer systems in the gateway made life for staff very hard when dealing with customer inquiry. Likewise councillors were limited on what they could do too.

The gateway uses a fully automated system to manage the queue in a way that I have, in the past, been critical of. However it is often better to have a working system that can be improved than no system at all.

Loosing one building due to a small fault is understandable but to drop the entire range of services speaks to me of not understanding how to set up one's infrastructure. I consult at an affordable rate these days should TDC wish to hire someone who knows what they are doing.

Later this year Thanet's bloggers will have a new set of laws to be mindful of. With such a confruntational appraoch to politics in the main parties and with it spilling out onto the blogs you can be sure that these rules will be called upon fairly heavily in short order once they come into power.

From 1st March 2011 the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code) will apply in full to marketing messages online, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children.

Quite how this will be applied to personal websites is not clear but activities for the purpose of attracting adverts may be deemed a business activity meaning that anyone who uses Affilaite Marketting, Google Ads or promotes their own business may need to be be mindful of what the regulations say. (Although the content of the adverts is the advertisers look out). For my full analysis of the subject see From March the ASA could regulate your blog.

Those bloggers who use thier own name and talk about politics such as Tony Flaig, Simon Moores, Michael Child, Mark Nottingham and Myself (to name but a few) need to be aware of is that there is a CAP code relating specifically to political "advertisments". This is section 7 of the code and it has two parts:

7.1 Claims in marketing communications, whenever published or distributed, whose principal function is to influence voters in a local, regional, national or international election or referendum are exempt from the Code.

7.2 Marketing communications by central or local Government, as distinct from those concerning party policy, are subject to the Code.

This means if Mark Nottingham and Simon Moores want to tell the wolrd how much the other is a right old duffer and a total waste of protean then they are not bound by the Advertising Standards Authority requirements to be factual, accurate or non harmful. Other laws, of course, may apply.

This also means (as I read it) that TDC and KCC will be wholly subject to the Advertising Standards Authority for all of their web content. I'll leave it to the comments section to discuss what this might mean for the later half of 2011 in Thanet.

For a full run down on what I think this might mean for bloggers in the UK and elsewhere please read my main article on the subject.


This is not legal advice just a layman's interpritation of what he has read. If in doubt please seek professional advice on the subject from a qualified expert. Thank you.

Have China Gateway International PLC been able to raise the £25,000 they needed?

Back in October 2010 China Gateway International PLC announced that it had issued 217,391 shares at eleven and a half pence per Share. That being what the shares go for these days (11p). The subscription was supposed to raise £25,000 in cash for "general working capital purposes" which sounds a bit like paying the bills to me.

Now I don't know everything there is to know about share dealing but I am pretty sure I picked up a thing or two working for a company that teaches (and uses) it. So I took a look at the CGA stock prices and noticed a few things.

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» Continue Reading: Is the China Gateway in trouble?

I got an urgent message via Facebook today.

As you might know we almost lost the Britannia pub last year and only a concerted effort stopped that from happening (which shows what the power of Facebook can be like).

The Brit needs you!

Tonight is Jam night and there are gigs this weekend but the Britannia needs you to turn up, due to the slow death of Margate and the exodus to the Ramsgate pubs we find ouselves very close to the position we were in last year.

If we lose our local there can be no going back as the site will probably used for 'luxury' flats to accompany the Turnip Centre.

There is no charge on the door and all you are required to do is turn up and drink!

Keep Margates best live music venue alive!

If you want to talk to me face-to-face I shall be in the Britannia tonight having a few drinks and chatting to people. If it is a ghost town I might pop over to The Bracket and see what they do on a Thursday. I was there yesterday and the music was significantly better than my first visit and I was able to learn that a complimentary beer delivered by a very pretty bar made with a smile that probably doubles sales by itself tastes even better than paid for beer.

Everyone there was awesome, all the ladies looked stunning (without exception) and everyone was much more chilled out if not-too-chatty. Anyway it was cool and is improved significantly by the candles getting lit. The tiny stage still makes me laugh but in a good way. Retro gaming on a NES from 7pm to 9ish was also on offer (I remember when NES was cutting edge).

So time to see what The Brit has to offer. All this going out lately makes me think I should be asking some of these pubs to become Blog Angels.

Remind me to review The Life Boat sometime.

According tot he trolls of late I am located somewhere between the far right and the far left. It all depends who you ask and when you ask them.

To help readers through this quagmire of opinions I have created a nice little chart.



I hope that clears things up for everyone.

I'm going for a pint and some live music - want to join me?

I am thinking about returning tot he Bracket tonight to give them a second taste so to speak. I realise that the first acoustic night after New Year might not have been the one to show them in their best light. So it seems fair to go see what another night is like. Tonight might be that night I think even though I have no idea who is playing.

The Bracket is the venue that used to be called the Punch and Judy along the seafront in Margate. Doors open at 7pm and music starts officially at 9pm but more like 9:30pm. I'm going to aim for sometime between 8:30pm and 9:00pm. Hopefully I'll see a few of you there.


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How to make Thanet Council video's usefull.

TDC video's are published in the .flv format that youtube loves so much sadly it's not terrably easy to make use of it off line and with the video only being avilable for a short while you might want a back up for later reference.

FLV format is a video format for Flash so in this TDC atre doing it right for once. However by not letting suers full screent hey are possibly breaching the one or two points of the disability act so watch your backside TDC the fines can get big!



Assuming I've remembered to include the image the above picture is of the source code for the webpage that has the council hosted videos. If you are not used to web source code then it can be impossible to read so make a note of some text before you press View > Source.

Search for that text (I chose the word "slower" fromt he blurb about slower connection). Look for the FLV file in the code (as highlighted in the image).

Past that into your web browser and your browser should offer to download the file. (Or skip that and use the links from Thanet Online.

Now what?

Well Windows Media player lacks the codecs required to cope witht his format and skipping the technical stuff I'll just tell you that VLC Media Player which is available on Linux and Windows for free will play FLV files and pretty much everything else too.

VLC was made for dealing with streaming media so you should be able to give it that URL you grabbed earlier from the TDC site source code and it will play the file. Now free of the flash player you can resize and see what is going on.

Convert it!

So you don't want to be stuck in FLV format. I can not blame you. One not converting the format for anything other than accessability could breach some bit of copyright law or something so use your head.

Stick Convert FLV into google for lots of options. Here are two.

CNET have a free converter but you need to opt out of an annoying toolbar apaprently. It's windows so I've not tested it.

There is also www.flvto.com which also apparently does the trick too. Again not tested.

So now you don't need to be worried by the "odd" format that TDC seem to want to use (correct as it turns out). You can grab a back up and make use of it for private and accessable viewing.

One last word of warning if, for some reason, you want to stick it up on youtube please remember that TDC will complain.

Today I think that maybe I wailed on the poor old Bracket just a bit too hard and the young guys and gals that go there. Hopefully no one has had their sense of humour amputated (with the exception of the team of trolls that have taken it upon themselves to find everywhere I write and tell me how much I suck).

I think that next week I shall pay the Bracket another visit with the view to being a bit more upbeat and slightly less sarcastic (not that sarcastic is not fun, because it is). So I'm going to inflict another does of old guy on you lot maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and...



See you there.

Yesterday I took myself for midweek beer to The Bracket where live acoustic music would be playing. Of all my expectations about what I might find The Bracket met none at all. It was a cultural and generational experience to be sure.

Familiar as I was with the range of people one can find inside The Bracket's sister (nightclub) event Totally Wired (given my very infrequent visits) I was not entirely prepared for what I found. Mainly this was because The Bracket and Wired have about as much in common as a beaver and a duck (not counting the embarrassing shared relative the platypus).

For starters early on in the night it felt as though my new title should be Granddad which was a very strange feeling. I was starting to think I'd accidentally walked into the worlds coolest youth club. Alas this was not the case and soon I was able to spot those guys old enough to shave.

Okay so this might be a little harsh. I was clearly the oldest guy in the room and at 34 I still see myself as young. Perhaps not as young as these guys (and a few girls).

The venue itself is like the badly advised mating between an old west saloon and a funky living room with retro-cool arcade games. This seems to work.

When I entered the venue seemed to be segregated into three cliques. Two major groupings of teens (and/or preteens with quality fake ID) and the rif-raf stuck at the bar for lack of anywhere else to go. I joined the rif-raf at the bar as clearly I had not yet earned my membership of the more exclusive gangs whose average age would double should I try to join.

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» Continue Reading: The Bracket Margate (Review)

On the whole not many people were able to describe themselves as "happy with Thanet District Council". In our straw poll a lot of people chose descriptions which were unprintable or anatomically impossible when describing their feelings towards Thanet District Council. Poor old TDC is not doing to well in the approval ratings.



The man on the street does seem to think that Thanet District Council (TDC) are generally a liability and at best should be associated with reproductive departure.




Thanet, China and Good Leadership as demonstrated by this Venn Diagram. While it can be said that China has some moments of reasonable leadership at least to the point that the current administration is still leading the same can not be said for the local authority that went on holiday to China at the expense of developers whose plans they later gave an almost unanimous vote of yes on a certain planning permission application they were pushing. That a yes vote was the only way the the aforementioned council would stand to earn a pile of cash on is considered a footnote.




It's not hard to see why the council is treated to such scorn. They might just be the only authority in the UK to get a 100% yes vote from a consultation and then pass a no resolution. Likely captions history might give this moment are: The council: it's their way or the high way or maybe Enacting the will of the people: You're doing it wrong - I'm sure you can come up with a few of your own.

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» Continue Reading: 2010 Review

No matter how bad it get's around here remember that it could be so bad that we need training videos on how to pour a hot drink.



They have one for cold drinks too!

Okay it's time for one of those street cred gambles whereby if I am right I will look very cool. Here are my 10 guesses as to what will happen in 2011 in Thanet.

1. The Turner Centre will open to much press releases and filler news stories. Uninformed bloggers elsewhere in the UK will repeat the official line. Due to the massive invested effort and over blown hype the initial turn out will be big and everything will be billed as a huge success. However that success will unexpectedly fail and someone will be fired as a result. Thanet will see no change from having the centre.

2. The debate about free parking in Margate will reopen as the summer gets going and there will be a few free Saturdays that will be badly publicized as a half arsed effort to curry favour prior to the elections.

3. The big vote: The conservative group will take a pounding in the elections, Liberal Democrats will make a big effort and get a seat or two and more due to the other side's losses than anything else Labour will take control of the council. They will claim the credit rather than recognizing the failure of the other team - in the next four to ten years they will fail in much the same way. China Gateway will not go away as predicted by the council members that voted for it thinking we would forget by voting time and it will cause a lot of shouting.

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» Continue Reading: 10 Predictions for Thanet 2011

In light of Tony's very important blog post encouraging others to join in this Thanet blogging lark I'd like to present some ideas that can help your blog keep going strong.

I'd like to point out that I don't know everything but what I do know I want to share. Feel free to add ideas of your own all insight is good - even if it disagrees with mine.

So here are 7 things that we as Thanet bloggers or want to be bloggers can do to make the splash that might just wake Thanet up.

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» Continue Reading: 7 things you can do to strengthen your blog