It is often joked that Supermarkets exist like vampires moving in to towns sucking out the juices and then leaving a rotting carcass behind. Sadly the story of Ramsgate seems to show this to have some truth to it - especially with the chain known as TESCO. Thanet Online carries this story.

After all Margate is already in the throws of saying no to TESCO - a gathering hosted by Arlington House Residents Association have already made a firm stand against the Margate development. They are unhappy about the TESCO redevelopment plans which will see the loss their mostly derelict car park while flat owners foot a bill of £17,000 each for the privilege. The multi-million pound scheme to build a TESCO in Margate where shops already struggle to get a foothold would also see the demolition of the shops on the controversial Arlington site (on Margate seafront).

With significant doubt being expressed at the idea that Thanet District Council might actually listen to the people the already heavily pummelled people of Thanet may find it hard to raise the fighting spirit needed. If so then we truly are as dead as Margate's town centre.

What no one seems to be asking very loudly is how on earth the roads ont he sea front will cope. Already the stretch by the clock tower is heavy with traffic and with the turner Centre due to open sooner or later one imagines that there will be more traffic. A TESCO and (if you have a lot of faith) some other big stores at the other end would surely bring grid lock. Some potential impacts might be that the golden beach becomes too smoggy when the wind is in the wrong direction, that bus journey times are lengthened meaning Westgate and Birchington suffer and those that rely on buses pay more.

As a result of this Margate town centre is unlikely to profit from the build and the old town will get harder to get to. TDC are likely to complain of dropping revenue from the multi story car park and stupidly raise the prices there again driving people to Westwood Cross and this new TESCO where they might get a shot at parking for less than the price of a small house.

Then again if the council was interested in reviving any part of Margate then they would be removing all barriers to getting traffic to the site not adding them.

But we needed fear that Thanet has somehow gone barmey wanting less TESCO stores. Activists in a number of places now oppose TESCO ont he grounds that they are now pushing into plalces they should never be.

Why are TESCO keen on new stores

TESCO are desperate for new stores. If not here then in France or anywhere they can build them. The reason - the folly of infinite growth.

TESCO like so many other big companies measure their health on financial growth and expansion. If some competitor has 0.1% more profits than they this is a "disaster". TESCO and every other firm is seeking to double it's size over a fix period the size of this period is dependant on the rate of growth but a decreased rate of growth is seen as very bad so doubling speed can get faster but never, ever slower.

TESCO has simply run out of places to put shops and yet they must squeeze twice as much money out of the population as they did seven or eight years ago. By 2017 they need to be looking at having twice the number of shops they have now.

It does not take a genius to realise that there is a point on this chart where there are more than one TESCO stores per person in the country. Sooner or later TESCO must fail and what they are trying to do is put off the time when it will happen.

It's the same for every business. And like every business before it TESCO must get more aggressive to survive. The simple rule of mathematics can not be by-passed you can not have infinite growth in a finite system! TESCO is no exception.

Has TESCO Turned Evil?

It's that time again when I get to talk to potential advertisers and see what funds can be raised to keep this and other blogs I run live and available to you.

Up for grabs in the next few months are a couple of the prime sponsor slots (top of the page between the two menu's and a set of four untaken slots in the sidebar.

These sponsorship locations are an indication of the value that the sponsors company offers to Thanet Star and to the best bidder goes the spoils. It works like this - you (or any other company) offer me what you think is a fair amount for sponsorship of Thanet Star, per month, for a length of time that is also up to you. The monthly rate times the number of months equals the value and the highest value get's the best spot. All offers of all sizes will be seriously and gratefully considered.

All sponsors get a write up and as such I reserve the right to say no if you happen to be a particularly unpleasant scallywag. A valuable SEO report may, if you have a website, also be published giving you an expert's recommendations at no extra cost while allowing me to show my skills.

Read More About Sponsoring Thanet Star.

In this article I want to revisit a topic that I last touched on in 2008. Why numbers matter in business online.

Numbers mater. If you want to know what the score is in a game of football you look at the scoreboard. If you want to know if you are winning or loosing at blogging you look at the numbers too.

Take things back further to the 3rd of April 2008 and you could read To get ahead in business - ask a blogger! and in that I showed how the leading sites of Thanet stack up in terms of valid visitors, quality of traffic and likely traction in the market place.

Part of that is down to SEO. I am strongly for quality SEO rather than snake oil, I'm all for taking Thanet beyond web design and that's all good but the one thing I want you to take away from this is that the numbers do not lie - you can tell who has understood and who has failed to understand from the numbers.

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» Continue Reading: Why numbers still mater in Thanet

The world of running your own web based IT business is not such a cozy place to be right now. It looks very much like I may need to take on work outside of my normal range in order to keep the cash flow at a level I can live with. Fortunately for you I still intend to maintain my web server and blogs.

This might mean working for someone else though.

That's not such a bad thing as I have discovered that jobs needing my skills range from about £25,000 to £60,000 depending on location and specialization of skills. So as a result anyone needing a Web Server Engineer, SEO Expert or New Media Analyst should drop me an email. I'm probably the nearest thing to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's that Thanet has and there is only one of me.

Ranking well in the competitive Thanet search listings is not easy. One minuet Google seems to love you and the next...

The subtle art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it's more level headed brother Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are a topics that seem to bring all the cranks to the field. For every one or two SEO experts in Thanet you will find as many as thirty snake oil salesmen. Sadly this is about average.

So how can you be sure to find a good SEO in Thanet and how can you be sure that the money you pay will be money well spent?

Keep reading for the secrets of SEO in Thanet.

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» Continue Reading: Thanet SEO, SEM and Snake Oil

Margate market's organisers failure to understand basic business principles is hurting traders and slowing local regeneration.

In a blog post called "You won't get customers if you don't advertise!!" local craftswoman, Sam, slams the inability of our local civic authorities to even get the basics in place. Come on Margate sort it out and stop being so apathetic she says.

She even lists five separate ways that the market (which I knew nothing about even though I live here) could have raised it's profile and gotten more people to visit. All of them are low effort, low to no cost and quick to do.

She doesn't even touch on the big things (like free parking) or adverts in the paper that might make a significant difference. When I described how How to Revive Margate Museum and Old Town in One Day I foolishly assumed that the organisers would put in the basic due diligence. We are failing here people because the basics are being forgotten.

Perhaps if the likes of Sandy stopped trying to sell as many carpets as they can and try to actually run the town we might get somewhere.

With just £70,000 Thanet could become the British Centre for invention and problem solving.

Given that the reported overspend by TDC last year was £3,000,000 and litigation with Turner Centre designers alone has run to £619,000 an investment of £40 thousand is a something the council should be able to find whenever they liked.

So how could £70k turn around Thanet's ailing economy?

In the USA MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms created an outreach program they called Fab Labs. In the video below Neil Gershenfeld talks about the huge potential for invention and innovation through access to fabrication (not to mention where we've come from and where we are going). click here for the short version



Fab labs have spread from inner-city Boston to rural India, from South Africa to the North of Norway. says the MIT website. Activities in fab labs range from technological empowerment to peer-to-peer project-based technical training to local problem-solving to small-scale high-tech business incubation to grass-roots research. Projects being developed and produced in fab labs include solar and wind-powered turbines, thin-client computers and wireless data networks, analytical instrumentation for agriculture and healthcare, custom housing, and rapid-prototyping of rapid-prototyping machines.

Neil Gershenfeld describes the surprising result of setting up these fab labs: in turn business started to grow he says (12:41) then he says that as scientists we're learning more from them than we're giving them

If that's not enough to knock your socks of at 13:01 he says there's now three students at MIT doing their thesis on scaling the work of eight year old children because they had better designs.

That could be happening this year right here in Thanet but for a small sum of money and a building to house a few basic tools.

Programmable Matter: Claytronics or Gershenfeld on singularityhub.com looks at micro fabrication including Neil Gershenfeld's fab lab project. They write Children, and adults, were designing chips, tools, and many other inventions to solve local problems. By providing the means, local solutions arose from local inventors.

The cost of this US$40,000 per lab.

What do these labs contain? just basic tools like a laser cutter, milling machines, a sign cutter and programming instruments. Now stop and imagine if we could build two of these in Thanet. Say one in Margate and one in Ramsgate.

Put them on the estates where traditionally people have a little more time on their hands then stand back and watch as human ingenuity transforms Thanet from a sleepy backwater to the centre for technology in the UK.

Now I'm going to head a few nay-sayers off at the pass on this one. No doubt some simpleton is going to suggest that Millmead and Newington are the worst possible places to build these labs and they would be (a) slightly right and (b) utterly incorrect.

These are not great places. There is poverty and crime and all those other issues that a housing estate suffers from. There are also a lot of people facing problems daily and thinking wouldn't it be good if we could just...

If an 8 year old in Africa can do in an afternoon what high tech companies require multiple sites and many workers to do then I think the people of Millmead and the people of Newgton are more than able to perform similar feats.

All I'm asking for is seventy thousand pounds and we could change the face of Thanet in a way that a big over priced art gallery can never do.

Yes, yes, yes and yes. I know that the adverts are all down. So is www.lordmatt.co.uk for many people. It is what is called a balls-up and it is caused by not havign a current card on file with the domain name registrar that cares for the domain in question.

Whoops.

It'll sort itself out over the next 48 hours and let that be a lesson to me. I should know better.

Having endured yet another painful and fruitless trip to Westwood Cross in search of nothing more complex than a bag I see a whole other reason why little shops should, must and will survive.

Faced with a bewildering array of things that I do not want and cannot use it is becoming increasingly hard to find what I am looking for. The bigger shops might "offer more" but in doing so they offer less. Less speed, less focus and less ease of searching.

The total irrelevance of the shopping experience is, for me, exemplified by Debenhams, Westwood Cross. The first floor appears to be dedicated to ladies clothes, underwear and other accessories while the first thing that hits you as you go to clime the stairs is "back to school" which is for sale goodness only knows where.

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» Continue Reading: The surprising parable of the Westwood Cross superstore

I'm probably about to remove an entire market segment from ever wanting to advertise on Thanet Star with what I have to say today.

While I have been struggling with technical difficulties in getting out the Thanet Twitter Podcast I am also actively engaged in other activities of life. Such as taking part in a house hunt on behalf of someone. I've seen a thing or two that have surpprised, shocked and upset me.

Lettings in Thanet is a highly competitive business and yet the companies involved let themselves down so badly that it's a wonder that many of them are still in business. The possible exception to this was Oakwood but more on that later.

I want to call the entire industry out on it's attitude to tenants, landlords and each other.

Each and every estate agent that also deals with lettings should be ashamed of themselves. Your standards are shocking and it is the customer (both landlord and tenant) that is suffering. It will take only one agency to take on board the need to change and it could spell the end for any number of other agencies.

It's first come most likely to survive.

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» Continue Reading: Thanet Estate Agents