Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

Ecommerce review: Telstra & Deals Direct

The other day my “portable phone” started to drop out mid conversation frustrating myself, my wife and our callers. What’s a portable phone you ask? Well it’s what I call a cordless phone. Maybe I’m strange, but that’s the thing about language – there are many different ways to describe an object. I was a bit out on a limb with “portable phone” but I should have been able to complete my task quickly and easily regardless of my long-tail key phrase. Sadly it was not so. Choosing and buying my portable phone was difficult. I was looking for a …

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 . …

Spamducation

When I was at Uni there was always “that class”. It was the class with the interesting name like “Sex and Politics” but was really about obscure French theory and the heterogenity of Southern Pacific political parties in the pre-war period. That’s right, boring!! I had the same experience the other day when I downloaded an eBook. It made my blood boil that I had provided my contact information on the promise of receiving something really interesting and useful. Sadly, it was neither. Having been disappointed how likely am I to buying the service? I subscribe to a lot of …

All that is solid melts into the air

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” When Marx wrote the great line above he was describing the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgious for control of the means of production; he was describing capitalism and the paradoxical desire for continual change and improvement. For Marx capitalism is a disruptive historical event that shatters existing social structures and illusions. Life is chaotic and fleeting. To survive, one must face up to …

Le Monde

There was once a bar unique amongst others in Melbourne – Le Monde. For a start it was a bar. The drinking culture in the old days was pubs and nightclubs; barns for drinking beer and getting messy. I spent many a happy night drinking, dancing and indulging in bad pickup lines. I was an expert at the bad pickup lines. Le Monde was a tiny little place, dark and sleek it bought a European sensibility to the top end of the city. I was lucky enough to work at Le Monde for a 6 months, the 7am to 12pm …

From Romania with order – the secret to conversion

When I was in Romania about 10 years ago I had some drinks with a local Optician and a Romanian rock star. We enjoyed many drinks and Raresh, the Optician, invited my girlfriend and I back to his apartment after the bar closed. Raresh lived in a Soviet style apartment that was very very clean. It was disturbingly ordered. All that was missing ware the plastic sheets to protect the furniture. He hated Romania and his low socio-economic status. He declaimed “I hate my country!” and told the rock star that he wished he has his life. The life of …

When I was young everything was different

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell. The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church. I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers. The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement. This kid had apparently clearly and …

Wow, I can get a personalised internet address now

Sometimes something seems really really good but it’s actually really really bad; stupid in fact. So stupid that when you realise that it is so, you feel like bashing your head against a wall and cursing the gods while shaking your fist at the sky. Or something like that. A “personalised internet address”. Wow. Are you excited. And guess what, you can get one from Facebook. Wow again. So what does this “personalised internet address” look like? Well, it looks like a facebook URL as in facebook.com/yourusername. Mine looks like facebook.com/jonstribling and I am proud as punch. Hang on I …

Catching the wave

When I was a kid I loved to surf. Now cruising to the beach with my thruster and catching a few waves was not an easy thing to do when I lived in the middle of the country five hours from the beach. It was frustrating that my nascent surfing skills would develop over summer and then slowly wane during the year. Each beach holiday I would need to learn again. Google obviously had a window into my frustrations about catching waves, recently announcing Google Wave, “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web”. Cute metaphors aside the …