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Week commencing 14th
November I headed down to Pardoe's Village Market to make good my promise
to take photographs of their Christmas products and the other members of
staff that I didn't take on the last two visits. I also picked up
some more of their frozen rhubarb :-)
I was then heading into
Toronto to attend the Scottish Studies board meeting which was held at the
Ontario Club and stayed over with Nola and Harold. This time I went by
train and had an enjoyable trip. On the way back I was sitting with a lady
that told me she is hoping to get the chair of the Health department at
Aberdeen University in Scotland. She was on her way to give a talk in the
USA.
Note that the Christmas
lights are starting to go up and the usual bank of Christmas adverts are
starting up on the TV. Have seen a few flakes of snow this week and am
told Chatham is due for 3 days of snow starting next Tuesday 22nd so
we'll see what happens.
This Saturday 19th I have
had John in to re-paint my office and dining room as the old wallpaper
decoration was showing through so hopefully that will be the final paint
job.
I got told of a member of
the Sinclair Clan Society doing great work in glass and has apparently
done some 4,000 angels as well as other glass work. I thought I'd send her
a picture of my two glass angels.
I'll hopefully do a wee
feature on her at some later date as she is based in Hamilton, Ontario and
I pretty well need to pass there on my way to Toronto.
On 22nd November we got the
first fall of snow in Chatham and it continues to fall although not heavy.
This is a picture taken from my front door on
Saturday morning, 26th
Thanks also to Cyndi I now also have my dining
room in a state to use although still need to get some pictures up on the
walls.
And you'll note a nice little bar coming
together :-) It's
been a quiet period since getting back from Toronto and I've been able to
move forward with getting books up on the site and have started another
three books. I was particularly pleased to make a start at the "Scots-Irish
in History" as I don't have anything substantial on them on the site so
this fills an important gap in our knowledge. I've also made progress with
a book "Our children in Old Scotland and Nova Scotia" which is really
about an amazing women who really started the organisation Prevention of
Cruelty to Children in Scotland.
I was reading the local
paper, Chatham This Week, on 30th November, and came across this article
about St. Andrew's Day. (You need to click on the article picture to get a
larger version to read)
I've been reading this local paper for a while
now and I see the same kind of problems in Chatham as I've seen in other
parts of the world. Essentially it's the loss of manufacturing jobs,
usually well paid jobs, that impact the community. Charity organisations
finding there is a greater call on their services but now have problems
finding sufficient money to meet the greater need. The lack of Doctors is
still an issue. And of course the local council is looking at ways of
saving money but still looking at a greater than inflation tax increase.
Rural parts of the area protesting that their services are always the ones
to be cut first. Need for more police officers and so it goes on... does
this sound familiar to your area? It sure sounds familiar from my time in
Scotland with all the same issues being discussed.
The one major difference in
Canada to someone coming from outside is the very low cost of living. I
guess salaries in Canada reflect this but certainly to someone coming from
Scotland I can get far more for my money.
Being a web publisher I
just don't see the web being used to promote my local area. I
offered to do some free promotional web work to highlight some of the
companies in the area and so wrote a letter to the local Economic
Development Department and handed it into their office. I didn't get
a reply. Mind you this is not unusual as I have found Economic
departments to be lacking in vision and innovation throughout the various
places in the world where I have spent time.
As an illustration of what
I mean I did a job back in Scotland for the local Grangemouth Development
Group. They had formed an organisation called chemeccose and hired a
marketing manager for it on a three year contract. The purpose was
to promote the area as a place to build oil and chemical plants.
Essentially companies like BP Amoco, Borg Warner, ICI, etc., all had
plants in the area but due to down sizing they had spare land. The
idea of course was to attract other chemical companies to locate new
plants. Well in year
two the marketing manager, Jonathan Drew, came to visit me as I was the
largest Internet company in the area. He told me in his research
that some 80 chemical plants had been built in Europe in the previous year
but all in either Rotterdam or Dusseldorf and none in Scotland. When
he talked to those companies he found that if they had been better
informed about the Scottish situation we might have got 6 new chemical
plants in Grangemouth. This would have produced some £850 million in new
business. He thus wanted to highlight the opportunity.
As a result of our
discussions I gave a talk to all the contractors that worked with BP Ameco
telling them about the Internet and how the web and email could be of
great benefit to everyone. Jonathan then went on to invite them to get
involved with the chemeccose web site that we were going to build
together. I arranged to host and run the web site for them for £500 a
year. I felt I should contribute my time for free to my local
community so the cost was just to defray domain name registration and web
hosting costs. We
quickly built a very good web site and most of the contractors contributed
by completing a fact sheet where they listed all their contact details
both locally and head office. They listed their skill sets from a list
that BP provided and so every contractor had a similar page. In addition
each contractor could supply a single web page with additional information
together with pictures and most did supply this. We thus had a huge amount
of information available.
The next step was to add detailed information
about the area. Things like emissions, list of land available for lease or
sale together with specifications and pictures. The local council provided
a basic page detailing the help they could offer along with the local
enterprise company. We showed where the area was in relation to Europe and
how the North Sea Oil was actually piped down to Grangemouth to be refined
at the local plant.
We then provided a news
section where the contractors could send in news of their own companies
work and so we really started to build a real community. The results
were most interested. We got phone calls from Investment banks in
the USA and Chemical companies. We also started to get asked about the
thoughts of local residents to the building of more chemical plants. In
short we were really starting to develop some genuine interest and got
many compliments from those banks and chemical companies about the
information we had put together.
Well at the end of year 3 Jonathan's contract
came to an end and about the last thing he did was to renew the web
contract for another year and told me that the local Enterprise company
would now take over the responsibility for providing information for the
web site. I continued to post up information the contractors sent
into me while trying to get the local enterprise company in Stirling to
provide up to date information without success. I just never got my
phone calls returned.
Anyway, at the end of the
year things were still going well and I issued my annual invoice to the
enterprise company for the usual £500. And low and behold I got the
first contact with them... to complain this was too high and they might
consider renewing if I dropped this to £250.00. Given all the work I
had done for them I'm afraid I got a bit heated in my response. I
then send them a credit note to cancel the invoice and told them they
could take the site over themselves and gave them 1 months notice to
transfer their content and domain to their control.
At the end of that month I took down the site
and some 4 months later got a communication from the enterprise company
asking if I still had a copy of the site. I told them I might have
but I'd need to go back into my archives but would need to charge them
£500 to do that. Needless to say I was being a bit nasty but in
practice the site never returned.
I only detail this to show
how Economic departments and local enterprise companies can actually hold
an area back by not using local knowledge and not having the quality of
staff needed to really provide vision and enterprise.
This local Economic
Development department has done a good basic job in getting a web site
together but as a company in the area you only get to add your contact
details but not your email address or web site unless you pay some money
to get that listed. This is really an example of lack of
understanding of how the web should be used to promote an area. At
the very least they should get their email address and web site listed
together with at least a page of information about the company. As it
stands the vast majority of listings only have the postal address and
telephone number under a category of business. This in no way helps people
to understand what services or products or skills that they have.
I am critical about
Economic Departments in general for lack of vision and to my knowledge
they all seem to be much the same when it comes to using the web to really
communicate to people that might have an interest in the area. There is
really a massive failure to communicate over a medium that is really the
most fabulous communications tool we've ever had.
Anyway... that's my little
moan for this journal entry :-)
And so it was off to the Doctor for my
appointment only to find that there was an emergency and the Doctor wasn't
there so had to make another appointment. Mind you I did purchase a
large double double Tim Horton's coffee on the way back :-) |
