Jonothan Stribling

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 man responsible for banning homosexual marriage, encouraging women to be housewives and supporting Pauline Hansen. Howard did send every Australian household web filtering software that was cracked by a 6 year old in 20 minutes before the election. But even he didn’t deem it necessary to filter content on a server level.

Senator Fielding, this parliament’s official tool, supports the idea and has prescribed a predictable shopping list of horrible things we need to be protected from.

I wonder if Bill Hensen is on the list? Thank god for the Greens.

The technology is unlikely to work without some smarts that can parse binary files. If it is word based it will just slow our connections down and be a hindrance to online business in Australia. It will not stop kiddie porn freaks wanking to Target underwear catalogues.

There is a bright side. Perhaps our future leaders will cut their teeth hacking what I think should be called The Great Digital Fence. They will hone hard core skills that will lead to a boom in technology and innovation.

Or perhaps we’ll have just have to buy Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the bookstore rather than online?

A disclaimer: I do not support any form of child porn or freakish abusive stuff. I simply oppose Internet censorship.

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, Doctor, Lawyer or Nick Cave.

Socialism as a brand offered a rock n roll politics. The red membership card was a dramatic contrast to the royal blue of the Liberal party and the insipid blue and red of the Labor party. It identified me as an independent thinker, a slightly dangerous ideas man, a man fighting for a better society. And it was very useful in pubs when trying to impress like minded 18 year old girls.

It is in this light that I have been interested in the move to the left in the major world economies as they respond to the credit crisis. The right wing dominance since Thatcher and Reagan is dead. Bush’s version of Reaganomics has flushed the US economy down the toilet. Ideology is back!

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 solution or a new test cannot be found. And this has really has nothing to do with numbers. It’s all fiction baby.

This has never been clearer to me than recently when trying to explain an adverse shift in numbers. It occured to me that as I, in my small way, construct stories about behaviour on websites, there are a whole bunch of finance analysts in grey pin stripped suits and finance journos in cheaper grey pin stripped suits telling stories about the economy.

They have been doing it for years, just making stuff up.

In the world of web analytics the final arbiter of success or failure is the profit and loss statement. Page impressions, visitor fallout, bounce, conversion, visitors and many others are just the parts which contribute to the whole. If you read the numbers incorrectly and tell the wrong story someone will soon tap you on the shoulder when they see the P and L.

But what happened on Wall Street? Who was reading the numbers and telling the wrong story? Even Alan Greenspan recently admitted his theories about deregulation were wrong. He was shocked to discover that when left to its own devices the market will descend into an abyss of lies, deceits and falsehoods.
The financial crisis is a good reminder to challenge your own assumptions, talk to you customers, read the numbers in a different way and see it anything rings true. Take nothing for granted.