My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

Category: Uncategorized

SEO is not dead, just maturing

There has been a flurry of comment recently about how Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is either dead, or in the process of being violently clubbed to death by Google. The argument is best summed up in this Forbes article which says that traditional SEO is being subsumed by content marketing as a result of Google’s algorithm updates which prioritises community value and interaction over inbound links. We are told that the future is PR not SEO. SEO as a practice is evolving in response to a changing market, as it has always done. When I first discovered SEO in the 1990s, the …

Wednesday whinge: Cooking, building, celebrity shows, and feelpinions

  This Wednesday winge is a call to boycott the cooking shows, the renovating shows, and the squawking shows. Now, I have been accused of being arrogant before. People may have even called me sanctimonious, out of touch, and hard to get to know. But on this one I am spot on: from our politics to our popular entertainment we are drowning feelpinions. Since well before Richard Burton returned from his exotic adventures in the nineteenth century and published 43 books for an eager British public Western culture has always been obsessed with celebrity and celebrity opinions. Then, as now, …

Noodles for breakfast

When the first British colonialists arrived in Western Australia and saw black swans they thought they were in topsy turvy land. Swans were of course white and only white. A black swan challenged the status quo and excited the dreamy abut other possibilities for this strange land they called Australia. We all grow up with values that are self-evident and so obvious to us that they appear as Truths set in monolithic stone. And then as our brains develop we start to challenge the truths in a orgiastic explosion of adolescent hormones. Then finally as our brains start to decay …

Why Deleuze would have loved the Internet

When I was a university student I loved French Philosopher, Gilles Deleuze for his complex and almost impregnable ideas which busted open the traditional pillars of western thought. Deleuze approached philosophy as an outsider. “What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.” There is a lot to learn from this kind of approach to life. Rather than accepting …

Forever

I am slightly drunk, sitting alone at The Lakehouse in Daylesford having an extravagant dinner to celebrate Natalie’s birthday. She has gone home to breastfeed the baby. It was better she leave and be able to come back rather than rush the meal and not be able to enjoy the desert – surely her favourite thing. I have been thinking about the idea of forever. It is an abstract concept that disrupts our temporality. In the heat of joy, fear, sadness, or stress we fear that it will be like that forever. With two small children demanding 129% from Natalie …

It’s rarely rock n’ roll but I like it

Everyone wants to be a rock star. No exceptions. Everyone dreams of being the coolest kid in class, of signing autographs, of getting all the girl/boy attention, of entertaining millions, of being the epitome of rock and roll, of getting phone calls from Keith Richards. In most cases it’s not gonna happen unless you count rockin’ out in your lounge room late on a Friday night. I still indulge my rock and roll fantasies as often as I can but know when to let go and focus on business. This is an important skill because rock and roll rarely works …

Everything is uncertain

2010 seems to be the year of uncertainty. In a year when we experienced the uncertainty of an election campaign that took weeks to get to any kind of resolution, the AFL Grand Final, the bastion of certainty in an uncertain perfidious world is also uncertain, incomplete. The game finished and players in both teams gave the universal symbol of sporting submission and despair, placing their hands on their heads and then collapsing to the ground in despair and confusion. The two team captains shared a brief word and then consoled their team mates. Spectators watching at the ground, on TV, on big screens, …

How I stopped worrying about Google

When I first discovered Google, it was a revelation. I was using a combination of Alta Vista, Yahoo, Dog Pile and luck to find what I wanted and Google returned the right results super fast. Fast forward to now and Google know more about me than my mother. I use Google Apps for jonstribling.info mail, Google AdWords, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Trends, Google Books and more. That is a lotta Google! A few years back, I started to get upset about the lack of choice in search engines. It’s not that Google do a bad job, they do an …

You and me, and the evolving web 2.0

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries. In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources . …