Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

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 …

Do they want a one night stand or a relationship?

It’s dark in the bar, some nice beats are playing, the lights hit your Grey Goose vodka and tonic, and make the ice cubes sparkle. You’re out for some fun. You are also a little drunk and strike up a drunken conversation about Proust with someone who seems flirty, fun, and sexy. It’s going great. So great that you end up at their place for a night of fun. Two weeks later you’ve forgotten their name. The one night stand is a moment of hedonism later tempered by a sober reality (and sometimes guilt). What if you met the person …

Off-page conversion is off the hook

Years ago, I read somewhere that 42% of people abandon a shopping cart due to slow performance. Recently it was proven to me that this might indeed be true which is surprising because most statistical factoids are garbage. After introducing a content delivery network service into an ecommerce site I saw a 20% gain in cart conversion. This was a pretty stunning result and it made me think about all the off-page conversion factors that can have a big influence on visit conversion that might be ignored because of a focus on design and copy. The standard approach to conversion optimisation …

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, …

On the Braggle: work, life and dreams

Fatherhood is good preparation for launching an online business. The problem is that a job, infants and new websites do not play nicely together. I have been working on a little project called Braggler, which is a community site for hagglers, tightwads, and perpetual savers. Having become involved after the site had been semi-launched with the old partners, I quickly made a list of what needed to be done to make the site useful. The original founder and I agreed on priorities and got excited. This was gonna be great. And then my wife had a baby. The work stopped. …

The stuff that matters

I am a sucker for sentimentality. Like Clint Eastwood, the stuff that gets to me is the stuff that matters, the non-trivial, the stuff that comes from the heart, the stuff I am passionate about. Simon, my brother-in-law was reading a post I wrote on fabricatedbacon.com about fatherhood and he looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, “You made me cry you bastard. This is much better than all that negative stuff.” He was referring to fucktard, a blog I started out of anger at Stephen Conroy’s Internet filter policies. Simon’s comments rang true. I started …

Content marketing, duh

Way back in the mid 1990’s when the Internet was younger and a little more ragged the pundits were saying “content is king”. The thought was that whoever owned the best content would own the web. How we use the Internet has changed a little since, but content is still king. The main difference is that now the content that describes content is emperor. Google have built an empire on this kind of meta-data and Facebook appear to be about to do the same thing with their Open Graph service. Clearly content and the content that describes content is central …

Entertain me

You see them everywhere – people with their heads down, supplicant hands, silent, staring at a mobile device. They are praying to the god of the Internet, requesting that the pipes and bytes entertain them, illuminate them and placate the boredom of being alive. Between 9pm and midnight around the world, the TV sits mute while people hover around the LCD monitor watching a rerun on hulu, or a cat doing backflips whilst wearing a tutu on YouTube. The Internet has simultaneously gone prime-time and become mobile and this is changing what people expect from their online experiences regardless of …

The anatomy of a #spill on twitter

Last night I was watching the ABC news and checking our twitter when I was some mention of an #alpspill. I searched for #spill, tweeted something inane and waited for the ABC to report something. It came in the 7.30 report and it amounted to guesswork by Kerry O’Brien about Julia Gillard being in Kevin Rudd’s office. Apart from the Twitter gossip there really wasn’t any news. Crikey was silent, The ABC was relatively silent, The SMage was relatively silent. Some “star tweeters” like @bernardkeane simply said “I can’t comment”. What there was on twitter though was a lot of …