Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

WebCentral launches new web hosting plans

WebCentral have launched a fantastic new range of web hosting plans for Australian techies and  small businesses. The most exciting feature of the new hosting plans is a 99.99% uptime guarantee. This guarantee puts the stability of big business hosting within reach of small business at a very reasonable price. No other Australian hosting company offers a similar guarantee in the shared hosting space at this price. Under the covers, the hosting platform has been radically over-hauled.  The platform is now built on Windows Server 2008 technology and offers .NET developers .NET 4.0 technology as well as the latest builds …

Are uneducated consumers extinct?

The other day I had a healthy argument with an old school marketing guy about uneducated consumers in a commiditised market. His contention was that uneducated consumers still exist online.  Like marks in an old style side show they wander blindly through the buying process and good businesses make good margin from them. This worried me a little.  I think that the Internet has made it so much easier to find information about products and pricing that novice Internet users can become very well informed consumers very quickly. The newbie might not be a gun online marketer but they have …

Thoughts on same sex marriage

I was surprised that I got married.  It wasn’t that I was really against it,  I had a girlfriend I adored and had a lot of fun with.  It was more the permanency and establishment vibe that said,  “I am a joiner”. I was a little anti-establishment in my twenties. I had a choice to get married or stay blissfully de-facto. It is a disgrace that my gay and lesbian friends do not. Two days ago the happily unmarried Julia Gillard outed herself as a social conservative saying she had a “pro-union, pro-Labor upbringing in a quite conservative family, in …

The web makes every business a media company

I was reading in The New York Times about how Google is now a media company and it struck me that the Internet gives every business the opportunity to be a media business or at least think like a media company. Firstly, what is a media company?  A media company is a business engaged in the production or distribution of media.  Most sales,  leads,  and opportunities result from their media activities. News Ltd is an obvious example of an old style media company trying to make it in a digital world.  Google can be seen as a new style of …

Why Facebook is still doomed.

Some time ago I wrote that Facebook was doomed because the business model relied on erecting billboards in parks. People were there to play, not be sold to. Since then, Facebook  has become bigger than many medium-sized countries and has been valued at more than $50 billion by investment bankers. Oh and my Dad who is 74, is now on Facebook. So if Facebook is bigger than most countries and worth a lot of money, how can I be right?  The answer is in comparing Facebook to Google.  Google has become uber-successful by opening advertising to the masses. Anyone with …

What utilitarianism can teach us about product development

Building something truly useful is a fantasy for most designers, entrepreneurs, and product people. Most will build something that is a reasonable copy of something truly useful and along the way convince themselves that it is gonna be great, that the folks are gonna love it. The truth is that there are very few transformative tools with a genuine utility. Transformative products create a new space for utility by solving a problem that we didn’t know we had. Twitter, Facebook, Google,  Get Satisfaction, Amazon’s EC2, Amazon are just a few businesses that have become an integral part of our lives …

How copyblogger got it wrong

The latest copyblogger post by Brian Clarke, “5 Landing Page Mistakes that Crush Conversion Rates” disappointed me. Rather than being the witty informative genius I have come to expect, it was a sales pitch recycling old information with no actionable content for the punters. The 5 tips were: Blowing the headline Using your regular site design Asking for more than one thing Ignoring basic aesthetics Being lazy These are nothing more than a shopping list of commonly accepted truths about landing pages. The problem with truths is that they can become so ubiquitous that they are no longer critically questioned …

Being constantly connected can be a curse

Like many people, I am constantly connected to the cultural world via various interfaces like the laptop, smartphone, iPad, tv, or even the radio. No matter the time, I can always get my fill of tech news, world news, cats playing the piano, mindless friend updates, photos from a distant holiday, or emails from work colleagues. It is a life lived online. The binary public / private has been shattered by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. What previously happened in the quietetude of your own home may have been known only to family and close friends, and discoverable only to snoops …

Downtime

Before I had children, I didn’t realise how much downtime I had. Life was a celebration of the simple pleasures like reading, writing, doodling, dreaming, cooking, and the odd spot of sloth. Now any downtime between work, bathtime, playtime, and feeding time is spent staring vacantly at the wall mouth half open with some drool dribbling down my chin in a catatonic state of disbelief. Or that’s how it seems. How could I have wasted all that time? But maybe it wasn’t wasted. Creativity can be fostered through work but also demands quiet reflection. A walk through the bush can …