Alexander Chalkidis

Month: July 2011

  • Interface time (again) – supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

    You know that something is changing when Google talks about a “beautiful interface”…   As the world tries to figure out how to keep their day job and still find time to check up their facebook, twitter, linked in and Google Plus accounts, it seems we are going full circle to the operating system debate again.   Whether it is thin clients, cloud computing, mobile or whatever.

    Google and Microsoft have shown which way they are going, trying to make it all “seamless“.   Same buttons at more or less the same place.   Get used to it.  Literally, that is an order:  “Get used to it!”  and then “buy our stuff, not the competition!”   That is what the interface wars are always about.   More than a decade ago I publicly predicted Nokia’s demise based on the premise that their interface couldn’t make the upgrade to a smartphone world.   Even things that seems minor, like the way Google real time operates, quickly become addictive, our brains just demand them afterwards.

    And now I would put my money on…Wordpress!   Not the interface so much (yet, though they are improving) as the design of a personal publishing platform.   I don’t want Facebook to organise the presentation of my information.   Nor Google or Microsoft.   Tumblr is very pretty and visually entertaining but no, I want a no-nonsense environment in which to make decisions about the stuff I care about.  I don’t want folders of Google Docs.   I need what comes when you put together the dynamic development rates of wordpress.org with the user friendliness of wordpress.com with…all that social stuff.   I don’t want comments from my friends to be in Facebook OR Google plus OR anything else.   I want them under my blog post where I can collect them and control them.  Without having to log in and out of ten different systems or hope that Hootsuite will get it right.

    My nieces just started a blog, just for the family, all about their holiday in Greece and what they are doing in the three weeks they are over from the U.S.   Nope, they couldn’t do it on Facebook, they don’t have accounts and I don’t think they should have accounts in a social network at their age anyway.    I have used WordPress for collaborating with just one other person (writing a kids book) or for a group of people on a work project which ended up running for more than a year and now has more than 150 very useful posts; it has become an internal resource to them.    To me it is testament to my skills as a consultant.   Beats a powerpoint presentation on many levels and it is alive.   But it couldn’t be done without Worpdress.   It is the business model as much as the technology.   You can start up a free personal blog one day for fun and end up at whatever other side of the publishing world the next.   I put some basic FAQs about electric bikes simply because I was tired of people stopping me to ask the same questions.   A few months later it is the No1 resource (and any Google search in Greek on the topic will get you there) for ebikes in Greece!  It’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious:

    Mary Poppins:  “You’d better use it carefully or it may change your life. ”

    Bert: “For example, one night I said it to me girl, and now me girl’s my wife!”

    Sure, there are other platforms which do some of this stuff well.   But I will be looking at “My Dashboard” on WordPress.com with renewed hopes that if “there can only be one” interface, these guys will get it right.

  • Communicational lessons from the Greek crisis

    As you watch the television coverage of riots in the center of Athens, you might find it useful to ponder for a minute on the situation.  Not for the conspiracy theories or the endless economic analysis we are all tired of.   From a practical point of view the items which might appear in your country too sometime in the future:

    1. What to do with millions of unemployed people?   That’s a lot of time and energy available from a lot of people.   If it doesn’t get channeled into something, some is more than likely to end up in riots.   If religion was the opium of the people in bygone times, soap operas later, what is taking up the slack now?

    2. Who is the enemy?   Again, if the bad guys are not defined, everyone is up for the part.   Many modern economic crises featured politicians’ focusing on some “other” to blame.   Used sparingly in politics or business, this strategy can in fact be useful to help foster social solidarity towards a common goal.

    3. Everyone’s an expert.  Social media and the internet have dislocated any traditional way of controlling the agenda.   Government inaction makes it even easier for a minor event on Twitter or Facebook to grow disproportionately to its true impact.   The only way to stay ahead in the internet age is to run faster than everyone else.   All the time.