Jonothan Stribling

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 sense of personal values”.

For Julia this expresses itself neatly into her view of same sex marriage as she said,  “the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status”.

That this is a transparent pitch to the conservative voters of Sydney and Queensland is blindingly obvious.  For me this is the last straw – Gillard is a bitter disappointment.  I expected Rudd to be opposed to same sex marriage given he is a God botherer,  but the left wing Gillard.  No way.

What I don’t understand is all the fuss and bother concocted by right wing radio hosts driving policy making.  My reading is that most Australians do not care about same sex marriage or at least they didn’t until they were whipped into a frothy outrage by the christian lobby. The Australian Christian Lobby even went as far to describe those calling for equality as “rights fundamentalists”.

Now that is kind of ironic and demonstrates that organised religion is not always a force for good in our society.

There is a rally in Melbourne this weekend,  26th March at 1pm outside the State Library.  I intend to go with my children because I want them to grow up in a world where everyone is respected and equal.

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 chatter. The 50 tweets a second about the #spill were not really news. It was a conversation between a whole bunch of people with very little authority.

The types tweets amounted to:

• An opinion about either Rudd or Gillard
• A joke about Rudd and the world cup or Malcom Turnbull
• A reference to Laurie Oakes who was appearing on Channel 9
• A comment about somepeople being in Rudd’s office

It was beguiling, fascinating and entertaining.

And entirely useless as news.

It wasn’t news it was a meta-conversation in a virtual pub. Everybody trying to be clever, funny and witty at the same time.

Twitter has a long way to go to become a viable news source as it lacks the authority that comes with being an established media institution or blog.

However, twitter demonstrated that it could deliver opinion about the news faster the the news could be published.

What is needed is an authority. What would enable this is a live curation where authoritative tweeters and sources are selected and promoted. This could be because of content or metadata like location, status or relationships with others.

This would mean that when something big happens twitter can continue to be a platform that provides real-time and more importantly, meaningful news.

Of course this could be just sucking the fun out of watching the conversation unfold.

Are you a liar?

I am. I lie continually.

I am like that Jim Carrey character who lies so much he is forced to spend a whole day telling the truth.

Lying, whether it be stretching the truth or a bald faced porky pie is an important skill.

Federal opposition leader Tony Abbott has established that he is a compulsive liar. According to Abbott things can be said in the heat of the moment that aren’t true. So if they aren’t true they are lies.

And that’s OK because it happened in the heat of the moment.

With professional and ethical integrity undervalued in corporate life, media, politics, the clergy and sports Abbott has simply told the truth.

The truth, that’s your version or my version, doesn’t matter anymore.

We’re evolving as a species to appreciate and respect passion over integrity.

“Bob lied when he said he would do the dishes!”

“Yes, but he was really passionate about it at the time. He really thought he would do the dishes.”

“That’s OK then.”

Substitute doing the dishes with paying a bill, being faithful, picking the kids up from school and the absurdity is made clear.

A community requires guidelines about trust that help build relationships and made sure everyone can get what they need.

A community that celebrates Tony Abbott for finally telling it how it is, is deeply flawed.

Passion is no excuse for deception.

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 .

There has also been a lot of chatter about what’s next. The teleological nature of the term, Web 2.0, lead some to focus on what web 3.0 might look like. Is it the mobile Internet? Is it the fast(er) Internet?

O’Reilly and Battelle see Web 2.0 simply as “harnessing collective intelligence.”

I always found the term a really useful rallying cry but overall a spurious oversimplification for what the web was always meant to be. Web 2.0 for me is a great epochal term expressing the evolution of how we use and interact with technology rather than a concrete real-world thing. And the danger with epochal terms is that we focus too much on the term, defining and justifying it, rather than the really interesting stuff that helps us understand the intersections between culture and technology.

In a new paper “Web Squared“, O’Reilly and Battelle write about how the web is on a “collision course with the physical world” through a proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, smartphones and real-time
microblogging platforms like Twitter.

For the authors Web Squared is “Web meets World” and they mount a compelling case for web technologies being applied to solve the problems of the world using the principles of “openness, collective intelligence, and transparency”.

I found the article to be both insightful and inspiring. The idea that the web is an entity comprised of devices and the collective intelligence of millions of users, which could be applied to the real problems of the world really speaks to my aspirations and vanity.

I can’t help think that O’Reilly and Batelle are speaking from a very privileged position as elites in the most webified economy in the world and that the global problems including hunger and poverty, drought, global warming, war, slavery, health, corruption and despotism are a long way from being solved by a bunch of well intentioned web developers, designers, strategics, venture capitalists and well-intentioned twitterers.

Not straight away anyway.

There is a direct line between the invention of the printing press and the breakdown of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. The opportunities offered by being able to easily and quickly distribute information meant that the monopoly the elite (the Church) had on knowledge was no longer tenable. The consequences of this “revolution”  took hundreds of years to emerge.

My point is that we’re too close, too involved, too emotionally engaged to really see whaat the epochal implications of the Internet revolution are. It is entirely possible that the Internet having been responsible for the breakdown of Western media empires dominance of the distribution of knowledge and information will be the catalyst for the breakdown of the Western economic hegemony. If 80% of the populations of China and India get access to the Internet and relative economic security the world and the web will look completely different. It will be dominated not by the privileged citizens of the West but by the “Other”.

The rise of the Arabic TV network, Al Jazeera and their release of broadcast quality footage from Gaza on a Creative Commons license puts this evolution in real context. I can’t see CNN, the BBC or even the Australian ABC putting their syndication deals at risk.

In fact it could be the case that the real revolution could be the emergence of a new global heterogeneity in the distributiom and consumption of knowledge, rather than the homogenous US dominated Internet. This has less to do with Web 2.0 than multi-lingual domain names and the rise of affordable Internet enabled mobile devices.

When we talk about conversations and interactions, most of us still have what Edward Said would have called an Orientalist point of view: “There are a lot of them and their economy is going well, but we invented Google and the iPhone”.

If we are to have a rallying cry to use the web to solve the worlds problems then it needs to be grounded in those radical ideas that provide the economic tools, including the Internet, to the world’s poorest peoples.

Each January the blogosphere is inundated with prediction lists.

It is a chance for each blogger to prove how smart they are. Some lists are hugely intelligent and some are hugely indulgent.

So in the spirit of indulgence I thought I would create my own list of predictions for 2009. But after some time pondering with a glass (or two) of wine I decided that a things that sucked about 2008 list would be the best way to look into the liquid crystal ball.

Google dominance
In 2008 Google consolidated its lead over other search engines. For a market to be truly open it needs to be competitive. With a 72.1% market share in U.S. in December and a higher share in Australia, Google has no real competitors meaning we will continue to pay more for competitive keyword bids.

I do not expect this to change much in 2009. CPC may even continue to rise as more and more businesses move their budgets online.

Less venture capital
US backed venture capital is at its lowest point in five years. This sucks because it means in 2009 there will be less investment in new ideas and innovation.

The sour economic climate has put the bean-counters firmly back in control.

Mobile
2008 was going to be the year. With the iPhone buzz it kinda was but it still wasn’t. 2009 is now the year. Enough said about that.

Ecommerce growth
Growth stagnated online for ecommerce sales proving online businesses are subject to the same buyer concerns as bricks and morter businesses.

Businesses that will do well are the aggregator sites that collect and distribute coupon codes, special offers and shopping catalogues. There will be more research done online before a purchase, particularily a major one.

Twitter
Twitter doesn’t suck. Not at all. I do get concerned about tech heads spending investors money to build something really cool with no business plan. It can’t last. I expect big changes here in 2009. Will the coolness be compromised?

Facebook
Facebook kinda does suck. There’s something I don’t trust about that Harvard drop-out. He’s too earnest, too smart, too rich, too powerful.

I do think Facebook have nailed it with Facebook Connect after the mess-up with Facebook Beacon. Connect plays to their strengths which is building open(ish) platforms for social interaction and engagement.

Web Analytics
There have been a whole lot of exciting analytics products launched in the past few years. Most have a freemium model. Some of my favourites are clicky, clicktale and exactfactor.

Google Analytics have made substantial changes that mean the product is very extensible and powerful. This doesn’t suck at all, so it shouldn’t be on the list but I wanted to mention it anyway.

Kevin Rudd
After the spectacular and long overdue sorry, sorry, sorry, Kevin was proved to be a political operator cut from the same cloth as John Howard.

Bastard! I was a believer in 2007. Now he has broken my bleeding liberal heart.

Wall Street Bankers
Those greedy bastards got greedy and bought financial products no one understood. They also forgot about something called the boom-bust-cycle. It was good to see uber capitalist Greenspan admit he was wrong.

I would like to see some public humiliation involving sandwich boards and tomatoes.

Summing up

So to sum up, for a great 2009 I recommend:

• Focus on web analytics and learning about your audience and what they are doing;
• Embrace social optimisation if you haven’t already;
• Invest in mobile technology;
• Write Kevin Rudd letters telling him 5% is not enough and web filtering is for autocrats;
• Watch your money very very carefully;
• Invest in innovation;

And, of course, keep on laughing.

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!