Jon Stribling

My own piece of the Internet
 
Jon Stribling

Content, bloody content

A website is kinda boring without content. The semantic web has no meaning without meaningful content. So why is content the last thing people think about when they are planning a website? It may be because people assume that the web is a visual medium and think visually about what they want. The boring words can always be grabbed from the company brochures, the tender documents, the introduction letters. This is why most small Australian websites have a bounce rate higher than 50%. People do not watch a website like they blindly watch the TV, YouTube excepted, although even YouTube …

The perfect 10

In the eighties film 10, Dudley Moore, a middle-aged musician lusts after Bo Derek, a young and beautiful woman. I don’t think her career was ever made obvious. In an iconic scene, Bo Derek runs down the beach in slow motion her body glistening with the sea and coconut oil. She is in Dudley Moore’s eyes a perfect 10. This scene and the idea of the perfect 10 reminds me of the lust for the perfect conversion rate. Some people say that 3% is a good conversion rate. That is 3 out of 100 visitors to a website buying or …

The blog easy

When I first discovered the web I found a site called Digital Diaries which allowed for creative expression online. I signed up and was soon publishing sarcastic poetry about my life and receiving the odd freakish email from someone in Ohio. I often think it’s a shame that the Digital Diaries site didn’t take off. Soon after someone came up with web logging and blogspot had some great software and we became bloggers. Digital diarist has such a nice old fashioned tone. It reminds me of Charles Darwin diarising about his horrible discovery that we are descended from monkeys. It …

The big screen

Senator Conroy, our new Minister of Communications has proven that the Labor Party still do not understand the Internet. Mark Latham in his wonderfully vindictive apologia, The Latham Diaries, writes that in the dying days of the Keating government the then Minister of Communications was terrified of Telstra and virtually at their beck and call. Whilst Conroy has been pretty hairy-chested in his approach to the Telco, the Rudd government appear to be trying to out-nanny the Howard government by censoring Internet content. Not even Howard attempted to server-level Internet filters to protect our fragile morals. And this is the …

The rise of the left

When I was 18 years old and just starting at University I sought out, amongst other things, the socialist club and paid my $5 fee to join up. I had some knowledge of socialism and a vague idea about communism, Lenin and a love of the great design of post revolutonary Russia and the art of Mayakovsky. But at 18 what really interested me was the brand of socialism, not that I would have put it that way then. Socialism was entirely other to the demands and constraints of a society which appeared to expect a clear choice between Accountant, …

Telling stories

I am not a maths nerd. Never have been. Words have always been more appealing to me. They can inspire, terrify and antagonise in ways that numbers never can, at least for me. With this in mind I’ve been thinking about how important it is to tell a story when dealing with web analytics. The ‘meaning’ is in the story not the number. This is particularly so when you are trying to explain something to executives. A change in a KPI may be significant or alarming but a problem cannot be identified without a story. And without a story a …