The Echo says on July 31:
BOURNEMOUTH’S tourism chief has revealed plans to install new cameras
along the seafront in a bid to provide accurate online weather
information for the resort.
Mr Smith told the Daily Echo: “With a couple of local companies, we are
exploring the cost and weighing up the feasibility of providing our own
webcams, purely for promotional purposes.
“Then people would not have to rely on inaccurate Met Office forecasts
which have cost us so dearly in the past. They would simply have to go
online to get a correct guide for the weather and surfing conditions.”
Couldn't Swanage benefit from doing this? I understand that each camera
costs round about £200 and has to be replaced every couple of years.
One situated at each end of the bay could do a fantastic job of showing
potential visitors how good the weather is, when the forecast is lousy.
The amount of money, spread over two years, is very little compared to
the potential benefits, surely?
Posted by Anonymous to swanageview at 6:02 PM
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There already are a couple of webcams around town; one is the PDC one at Peveril Point, one via Swanageonline, I think...
see:
http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/gallery/webcam.aspx
see, the very unreliable:
http://www.purbeck-dc.gov.uk/content/lilin/indexjava.htm
and here's another, I've never known the webcam to work, but the live weather bit does:
http://www.pooleharbourweather.com
Another point about this - the beeb, or whoever, say grey and wet so nobody visits, I wonder how many times they say sunny, so people visit and it's grey and wet?
The first two links work, you may have to look a bit deeper for the direct link to the Lifeboat webcam:
http://www.swanagelifeboat.org.uk/
http://www.virtual-swanage.co.uk/gallery/webcam.aspx
These two (Purbeck D C)are not working currently. Nothing new there then.
http://www.durlston.co.uk/index.php?nid=82&id=61
http://www.purbeck.gov.uk/content/lilin/indexjava.htm
I also checked another Purbeck D C site - not working of course:
http://www.purbeck-dc.gov.uk/content/weather/index.html
So, in a nutshell, Purbeck [D c} isn't working.
Webcams are a great tool - but - they only tell you what the weather is and not what it will be.
Having lived in Swanage for twenty years, I agree that these cameras might be useful; however the weather in our maritime climate changes so fast that they will not provide reliable information to someone comtemplating a visit from Basingstoke, Exeter or even Poole. Remember the old adage: 'If you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes' (it works the other way around, too: 'If you like the weather, just wait a few minutes....'!).
A small, unrelated point: should this blog quote direct from newspapers without permission? I am not sure where lines are crossed over copyright, but I have seen from time to time entire newspaper articles reproduced, I believe, by copy and paste. Might it be safer and more correct to simply type in the URL link, so that your humble reader can go straight to the article at its source?
It's a question of "fair use".
I agree that copying a whole article could be dodgy, but quoting from, so long as you provide the source, shouldn't be a problem.
See:
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p09_fair_use
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