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News and Comment September 2011

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25 September - Their number’s up

Alex and Priti Priti on BBC Question TimeAs indicated yesterday, the number of website visitors falls noticeably at the weekend so it is tempting to take the day off, but on the other hand Monday is often the busiest day and it wouldn’t be fair to give all those office workers nothing to read.

I am a big cynic when it comes to ‘website hits’, I suspect that half the people who come to websites do so by accident and rapidly leave, never to be seen again. If people are spending an hour or more on Bonkers, and some do, I suspect that they have left their computer running while they go and watch TV.

Advisers on web statistics say that the average number of pages looked at by each visitor to sites in general is 1·7 and if a site scores three it is doing very well, so I am happy on that score.

What I find interesting is the words put into Search Engines that route to Bonkers. There was a big surge at the end of last week in people looking for Bexley councillor Alex Sawyer and his wife, the MP for Witham Essex, Priti Patel. I expect that is because Priti appeared on last Thursday’s BBC Question Time and I guess many visitors were disappointed because few stayed long.

Whilst on the subject of BBC TV… I regret mentioning a forthcoming Panorama a couple of weeks ago. The programme I was interested in has been deferred again and will not be on tomorrow.

Other local names frequently searched last week which resulted in much longer stays than Priti’s were Chief Superintendent Stringer of Bexleyheath police, Chris Loynes, councillor Aileen Beckwith and councillor Katie Perrior. All well into double figures of searches. What has Aileen Beckwith done to deserve that, like the majority of Bexley councillors she barely features here?


Orchard School warning letterPossibly because the schools are open again there was a large number of searches for South Eastern Attendance Advisory Service, the company featured here last July which was writing scrappy notes to parents threatening them with legal sanctions but which was displaying a false address and no land-line phone number. All the people running the company, Philip Turner, Denise Percival and Irene McClellan are Bexley council employees. Maybe not for long.

Since Barrington Road Primary School got into bed with this amateurish outfit I have noted more schools joining in so some incentive must be given. Money is bound to be involved somewhere. Among the new converts are Belmont School, Erith. Welling School, which issued eight pages of rules for parents, and Orchard Primary School, Sidcup.

Possibly more reliable than website hits as a guide to ‘popularity’ are emailed comments. There have been two in the last two days complimenting the owner of the garden which Bexley council called derelict for creating such an attractive scene. Not so good were two comments independently passed on to me saying they don’t like the site because it is so dreadfully rude. I’m hoping that they are confusing Bonkers with Olly Cromwell’s site. It is currently off air because the police who don’t seem to care about Bexley council being involved with obscene on-line remarks about residents fly into action when they are on the end of some truthful, but perhaps tasteless, remarks about one of their own. Never forget, “We are all in this together”.

 

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