Alexander Chalkidis

Blog

  • My friend Jason is smarter than me and 99% wrong about social media monitoring

    My friend Jason is very clever.  He has taught me a lot about advanced tech geeky stuff concerning metrics, social media and monitoring services.  He knows all the AI and Natural Language Processing stuff.  He has a company which is sure to be bought by Google or someone like that.  And he wrote a fantastic post which I thoroughly recommend if you want “the short version of the future of media monitoring for business” here.

    He is also 99% wrong.  Not in what he writes.  I am pretty sure that – as usual – he can see what is coming better than I can in his area of expertise.  But in tech, that is not what it’s about for your business.  In tech, I am the best futurologist because I now the timing of what is coming.   And throwing away dashboards or whatever else Jason describes is far, far away.

    If you live in Silicon Valley and all your friends use Slack, sure, be my guest.  The rest of the planet, read on.  Your country’s internet is not as rich as the guys over there.   Every day I look through analytics for customers’ sites and blogs and I am amazed.  “Seriously!  Has nobody written anything better on this topic and we are getting 50 Google organic search results for this???!!!”  Every day.  All the time.    It is not just in Greek.  I have run projects in other languages, heck, languages I don’t even understand, and still got fantastic response with content.  You can even just Google translate a page, stick it on your website and it will work.  Not talking about spammy tricks here.  People coming from a Google search for something also read longer and click on more pages afterwards.

    The main reason most small and medium sized companies want media monitoring, or social media monitoring is not for fancy sentiment analysis or crisis management.  It is to sell.  We want customers.  Every word I write here is designed to make you want to hire me.  Every word I write for a customer selling shoes is thought out so as to honeypot the right kind of consumer to buy those shoes.  I love Jason’s new tool, you can try it for free at http://qualia.ai/  Sure it’s not the most simple thing to make Boolean queries, most of you clicked away just reading the words.  But it is much, much better than Google alerts or whatever other freemium, crapium you are currently using.  And if you use Jason’s smart company, it will get even more useful.

    For what?  Well, as Jason correctly says in his post, we need “actionable” data.  We need to integrate it with business workflows.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is what I always say to customers, just before they say “you are right, but let’s just do the quick and dirty thing now to get this project done.”  Your average one-man-show marketing person struggling to prioritise social media posts and measure what the hell is going on, wants a tool to find stuff and help create stuff for repurposing content.  Very few companies bother to optimise a system, any system, enough so that it automates such decisions.  “Hey, Marketing division, you are all fired!  We have an advanced AI which can figure out better than you the trends!”  Fantastic, let’s get that in here asap.

    Of course I am biased.  I loved content marketing.  I am struggling to write this paragraph without consulting some data to decide which words to use to best attract Google but since it is the last paragraph, the weighting here is not as important as the opening paragraph and I will just say what I mean: the world’s internet has not got enough content.  Google is getting better at making sense of content.   If you are not operating in English have a party, you have an enormous opportunity to easily get customers like that.  Go make better content than what is available.

    If you don’t know how, hire me or hire Jason.

     

  • The fallacy of collective brainpower

    I was 12 or 13 years old when I came across “The crowd”.  It was in Greek and must have belonged to one of my many intellectual cousins.  The subtitle reads “a study of the popular mind” and I couldn’t put it down.  We were guests at my aunt’s house and I read it all before we left.   No matter it was written in the late 19th century; this was fresh and relevant!   While other kids listened to Simon LeBon of Duran Duran, I thought of Gustave LeBon’s amazingly relevant book.  Had never seen it again until recently when I got a copy in English.   And I juxtaposed it with “the Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki written more than a hundred years later and full of examples about Wikipedia and crowdsourcing and how 100 bricklayers can make a better decision than a consultant that gets paid 20,000 per hour.

    But Gustave was right.  I grew up checking his conclusions against my reality.  I could see it at my school.  When enough kids get together, they turn into animals.   I could see it across the street in the early 80’s, as Andreas Papandreou, that master of deception, spoke with simple slogans while stealing billions.  When you get enough people together, they lose their capacity for critical thinking, they “go down several rungs in terms of civilization” as he says.  There is no sense of personal responsibility.  Simple slogans, repeated again and again.  Music, images, emotion.  There is no wisdom in this sort of crowd.

    I love what companies like Google are doing with our collective data.     I gladly give them access to almost everything I think and do in exchange for their amazing tools.  They make my life much much better.  Yet it is clear that this is not the product of evolution in our civilisation, nor the inevitable course in technology developing.  It is a fortunate respite from a kind dictator.   All these great ideas about the collective wisdom we could develop with technology depend on a kind central hub allowing them to work.  Or, as Surowiecki puts it, we need independence of opinion, decentralization and diversity before we even get to the matter of aggregation.

    Our current tech boom is to a large extent an acceptance of failure.   Companies that establish massive followings define the terms, give away stuff and up the ante in terms of infrastructure.    You reward them by buying their stock.  Or by making small companies whose sole aim is to be bought out by the giants.  In the words of LeBon ” every civilisation is the outcome of a small number of fundamental ideas that are very rarely renewed. (…) At the present day the great fundamental ideas which were the mainstay of our fathers are tottering more and more. They have lost all solidity, and at the same time the institutions resting upon them are severely shaken.”

    Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  • Where is what I am looking for?

    Λόγω αλλαγής στον server, όλα τα ελληνικά άρθρα είναι πλέον μαζί στη διεύθυνση http://greekinter.net/

     

    I moved my server so if you are looking for that previous site with my shiny bald head, look no further.  All the content from that is now here.  I also threw in some other sites for good measure, various projects from the past with information people search for.  Being a good Samaritan, I saved it.

    If you are looking for Greek content, it is all together at www.greekinter.net  And I mean “all together” as in “fifty different topics all together!”  You will need to use the search function if you are looking for something specific.  As far as I can tell, Google has managed to follow my instructions and should point directly to the right content most of the time.  There are quite a few internal dead links which I will work on when I find time.

    There are bound to be some loose ends here and there, it is more than ten thousand articles to tidy.  Hopefully the content is worth your trouble!

  • English uber alles: the language digital divide

    Google assistant is fantastic.  Unless you don’t speak English.  In which case it is almost useless.  The whole “Artificial Intelligence” vogue is rather misleading.  Because when I speak to Google Allo I am still using all my experience in computing.  It works great for me because I think like a computer.  I break down my questions into chunks the way I think the computer wants to hear it.  I add qualifiers, words to help the machine understand with more accuracy.  I use terms that are more likely to work.  When we say “natural language” hey, there are classifications.  I use “natural language more likely to be understood by Google”.  It drives others crazy.  They blame my perfect accent.  “But I said the same thing!  Why doesn’t it work for me?”  

     

    Here’s the problem.  Google and pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley, they are all only thinking in English.  Your Amazon Echo is designed for native English speakers.  (Pun intended.)  All your gadgets are.  Worse still, the intelligence is designed around people thinking  in English.  All the structure, the concepts, the way it is set up.  It is rather entertaining how some people get caught up with the fact that slang and tech words are conquering the world.  That is the tip of the iceberg.

     

    Silicon Valley is moving ahead of the rest of the planet with leaps and bounds.  Light years ahead.  We don’t have local information.  We can’t use amazon like you do.   We can’t pay for stuff or call a self driving car.  Amazon will not be able to deliver to the trunk of my car either.  The United States are a test bed for new tech and the gap with everyone else will grow exponentially.  And only in 2030, when computers are smarter than humans, maybe, just maybe, those computers may decide to develop all these wonderful tools for the rest of the earthlings.    And even then it will take a lot of work.  Because English is the language that provides the structure and concepts.  More likely that you will have all learnt to think like Google by then. 

     

    2030 is still material for science fiction.  Today, now, it is clear that we all have to move to the Valley or fall behind.  We have neither the data with which to develop such advanced tools, nor the number crunching power.   The entire planet sends their thoughts to Google every day  Out position, habits and preferences.  It is no conspiracy theory, it is simple mathematics.  Not impossible to catch up, just really really hard.

  • The debate-izer of online noise

    Was recently checking out imzy (www.imzy.com invitation only, they gave me a dozen if anyone wants one) and it got me thinking about the time we spend trying to reach a conclusion online.   Imzy has quite a reasonable user interface for a community type website.  It is surely better than Facebook’s and uses better thought out colour, graphics and notifications for what it does.  But I want more.

    Very often in online discussions the whole thread becomes unreadable. Comments, responses, nested responses, people answering at the wrong place, others waffling on and some with gems of wizdom. What would be fantastic is some more automated way of turning a 150 comment saga into a “pro and cons” type exposition.

    Having the “most liked” comments on top isn’t the best way.  It might just be that the online bullies are liking each others’.  My idea might need an actual person (whoever is running the show on the particular topic/page) to manually whizz through the comments and throw them into a basket of sorts.  Ideally it will present a tree like graphic which expands and contracts to demonstrate which facets of the topic had been covered.  That way we won’t be going around in the circles so common with online debates.

    Older users of online forums will counter that we can do the same thing with categories and locked topics and featured topics and….well, you get the picture.  They are obviously “older users” and have missed the whole digital revolution.   Fast and furious, cute and cuddly, interactive graphics which are “good enough”.  Stuff we can take in our peripheral vision, that’s what we want now.

    In the late 1380s in London the fashion was debating societies. At the end of the show the person running the two hour event, presented everyone with the conclusions, as in a summary of what had been said for and against.   For all of us who love discussion and truly seek the truth rather than trying to enforce our opinions on others this would be a wonderful thing to strive for 600 years later.

  • Apple’s (real) product recalls and Brad Pitt’s (alleged) whores

    If you Google “apple product recall” you get less than a page of results.  That is peculiar, isn’t it?  Try searching for “recall history” or anything like that and you more or less get the Google equivalent of “what you are looking for does not exist in this galaxy”.  So then being Greek, I use the terms  “ανάκληση προϊόντων Apple” and get 32 thousand results.  Obviously the propaganda masters at Apple don’t bother with Greece.  Much like Apple support doesn’t bother with Greece and other “minor” markets.  They just rely on the well documented pro Apple journalist bias.  If I want a more serious and organised list of Apple product recalls, I can go for the United States to the Consumer Product Safety Commission.  That gives me many many more Apple product recalls.  And that is when you realise it is not just that Apple users are fanatics.  The company puts a lot of PR effort in making information disappear.    As it lobbies Washington to fight Samsung with legal fines and other restrictions.

    PR and lobbying are of course well established form of corporate action.  Will Apple get fined for the whole Irish tax debacle?  Of course they won’t.  Hold up a bit with all the emotionally appealing “think different” adverts of us all flying about in the perfect future, white clothes, white background, white devices and white hoverboards.    Earlier this year Apple recalled  iPhones, iPads, iPods and Mac computers sold from 2003 to 2015.  And you think Samsung is the problem?  They admitted to 12 “incidents” which means that there were probably hundreds.  It is rather entertaining to watch liberal America up in arms against the “irrationality” of Donald Trump.  He lies in your face, changes views, claims the internet as an information source and generally does pretty much whatever he wants with absolutely no attention paid to facts or logic.  Yet “70% of the most active iPhone states vote Democrat“.  So you are accepting irrationality from your phone’s manufacturer, but think it is not OK for a President.

    Who is more likely to have had an affair?  Brad Pitt or Stephen Hawking?  A politician or a doctor?  You will make a guesstimate about any of these questions based on your available information.  Do you read gossip magazines often?  Do you work in a hospital and hear rumours of infidelity often?  Apple makes product recall information disappear because it knows you won’t bother to search or think about it as long as I did today.  If I ask you about Brad Pitt again, but this time it is via chat on your cell phone, you will answer even more succinctly if you don’t like typing there.  Especially if you are using the iPhone keyboard which for some ridiculous reason is different from other keyboards on the planet.  As humans we are always looking for shortcuts.

    It is the same reason homeopathy has lasted so well despite being complete rubbish with absolutely no results on any level.  (No, not even placebo.)  No matter how much evidence you pile in front of someone they respond “well, one time my son had a terrible rash and it just wouldn’t go…but homeopathy saved him”.   One time, one highly subjective personal experience trumps everything else.  And you can’t outTrump Trump.  Stupidity is unbeatable and we are all terrible judges.  You don’t know if the new iPhone is any good like you don’t know if you are more likely to get hit by lightning, a car or a falling piano this year.  In fact I suggest you are more likely to guess whether Brad Pitt does drugs with Russian prostitutes than to objectively compare an iPhone with a Samsung phone.

    It is a bit like a husband-wife argument about who does most around the house.  Each of us focuses on their own contribution.  What it costs each of us in terms of energy.    Apple computer users have put up with the absolutely ludicrous application navigation wheel for years.  When pushed they will claim it is “the best”.  Like iPhone users claimed they didn’t need copy-paste until they got it.  Or two buttons on a mouse until Steve Jobs presented the magic mouse.  They “burned Pentiums to the ground” one month and the next were “using the incredible power of Pentium”.

    So leave Brad Pitt alone.   And check those product recall lists before you start talking about Apple.

     

  • R.I.P. people that get tired of tech

    Spent a good hour tidying cables today.  Three boxes full of them.  You can do a fairly good review of what came and went in the past four decades just by explaining the hows, whys and whats of these cables.  How we used to load software from audio cassettes.  Peculiar items needed to get early modems to work.  Dozens of cables from things that had caught on, so the cable was in all sorts of gadgets, and peculiar cables from technologies that failed.  It is easy to understand all those people that simply announce they have had “enough”.

    “I don’t even try to keep up anymore” announces a friend.  Yet straight after that he wants me to help set up something on his smartphone.  It makes no sense.  Sure, at times, gadget mania gets out of hand.  And we have all failed in predictions or made bad buying decisions.  But tech is life.  Since some ape picked up a branch and whacked another ape, we always look for better ways of doing things.  Faster.  More fun.  Think different and all that.  At worse because we get bored of the old stuff.

    “Why on earth do you do that to yourself?”  Another friend wondering where I find the patience to try and hack my kids’ latest game, or set up something peculiar on my home network.  Tinkering is a way of life.  Looking for better ways to live.  Tweaking and adapting.  People complain about how technology is distancing us from nature but we are simply adapting.  Charles Darwin would be proud of my cable collection.

  • Data comparisons show just how far ahead the U.S. is in tech

    It started with a friend’s interesting project.  https://gotelonica.wordpress.com sets forth to draw comparisons between two European cities.  “Everyday stories, vivid images, mutual interests and hopeful efforts”… will have to be good enough though because finding decent comparative data is pretty complicated!

    If you search the internet for “city comparison” or anything like that, you are most likely to find a US site comparing US cities.  Mobility in the United States is a fact of life.  And great websites cater to all sorts of ways to discover if your new job offer is as good as it sounds.  Or if you should buy a house there or anything else you are interested in discovering.   Similar efforts within Europe are almost non existent.   UN Habitat data doesn’t include Sweden’s second largest city.  Interesting online articles with catchy titles such as “these are the world’s dirtiest/most dangerous/best cities” rarely include both Thessaloniki and Goteborg.

    In fact an American website offered the best weather and crime comparison.   Thessaloniki has a lower crime index and higher safety index.  Which doesn’t say much unless they analyse exactly how they get, process and quantify the data.  Being Greek I know for a fact that the stats coming out of that particular civil service are far from perfect.

    You may eventually find some meaningful ways to compare the cities, if you try hard enough.  Gotelonica is an excellent idea because statistics are almost meaningless on their own in such a complex environment.  European cities cannot be set side by side like American ones.  We have no real federal or state system in place.  The European Union is meant to help us work in different places but in fact there is not that much mobility.  And the lack of data is a pretty convincing evidence of this.

    We are decades behind America and it shows.   Much like my objections to Greek Police statistics above, almost any matter (other than the weather) concerning European cities is bound to become political.  Different measurements, different resources allocated to statistics, different infrastructures which make the numbers rather drab tools to paint a true picture.  It makes it even harder to build any sort of technological platforms or apps.  So we just sit around while Google and Facebook speed along by getting users to volunteer information, live with their tools and then use machine learning to offer better judgements than any European tool ever could.  Google traffic data is the best pan European resource for how fast you will get from A to B.  While we argue about how and why our GPS alternative never got off the ground, Maps just keeps getting better.

    So next time you start talking about European tech entrepreneurs, take a moment to consider how hard it is to get decent databases to work with.  Or to attract other Europeans to your city to work for you.   Or even to calculate ahead of time the chances of either of these two happening.

  • Facebook will help us rebuild Greece

    No, Zuckerberg isn’t about to buy Greek debt.  Nor will he set up Research and Development in Crete.     He isn’t even going to call up European leaders and ask them nicely to be kinder on repayment terms.  Facebook is going to help us build consensus.

    Most people currently believe that social media achieves the exact opposite.  It is not mass media.   We hide alone and pretend, end up feeling inadequate…and all that kind of thinking which is prevalent right now in research papers.  “Get off social to get happy!” seems to be the accepted wisdom.

    But let’s talk about really bad politicians.  We all have some.  My Italian friends simply could not believe what Berlusconi got away with for so long.  Americans are currently worried about Trump but forget they had George Bush, an equally dangerous buffoon, calling the shots for two terms.  The British simply laughed at the idiotic stuff Tony Blair came up with regularly and most African countries are almost used to crazy dictators.   All around the world, people vote for leaders so incredibly stupid, we would not trust them to hold our ice cream, let alone decide our kids’ future.   (More on “Trump, trinkets and the triumph of the twats” here.)

    In Greece we have Alexis Tsipras.  I don’t need to run through moronic highlights.  The whole world has had a taste.  Take the worse you have seen or heard about him and just multiply it by a hundred.  He is an absolute idiot.  Uneducated, incapable and brash.  A lethal combination.

    What is interesting about this particular clown however is his rise to power and what we did about it.   Many of us could see it coming.  We got on our soap boxes and cried:  “can’t you see?”  They couldn’t see.  He got elected.   Some of us insisted and from Day1 posted all the terrible things they did.  Still, we were the weirdos.  Yannis Varoufakis upped the ridiculous ante.   We were on Facebook about it.   The “let’s give them some time to see what they can do” attitude started cracking.  Some Facebook friends started expressing doubts.

    Gradually more and more people turned.   If you are professionally on social media like me, you see a lot of different profiles, a lot of different groups of “friends”.  The arty people seeing their hopes of socialist reforms dashed.   The business crowd feeling the enormous damage done to the economy and the image of Greece abroad.  For a communications guy like me, the signs were glaring, obvious and flashing like bright lights: my country has split up into two social media clans.  On the one side are civil servant and all those directly or indirectly making money from Government.  On the other side the private sector.   We are the schmucks paying the bill.

    This is no new divide.  But social media is helping as clear up the situation.   If you are a civil servant you can’t hide it from me in the long term.  A recent Facebook unfriending made this pretty obvious to me.  He is my age, full of energy, similar outdoor interests, also a keen traveller, well read and we agreed on everything.  Even touchy subjects like child rearing approaches.  In politics we had a similar approach, ended up supporting similar parties.   On Facebook it seemed so that is.   And then recently he did it:  he reposted an article that “not all civil servants are evil”.

    Like you do on Facebook, I pushed a bit.  It didn’t take much prodding.  He came out and admitted it:   “I am 47, have a wife and a kid now, I will not give up my job security”.    It was the fastest unfriend I have ever done.   Because it was obvious. Sharing anything with him is simply a waste of time.   I live in a global economy and have my kids ready to go to any country in the world necessary for work at a moment’s notice.   Government handouts are not part of this plan.  Business opportunities are always global.   He talks the talk but, like the bloated Greek public sector, will not walk the walk.

    Though only half Greek, I love this place.  Greek culture can and should have a bright spot on planet Earth.  But it will not achieve anything while sitting on its butt.  Through Facebook we will unfriend all those civil servants.   We will uncover the hypocrites.  Over time they will give themselves away.  Sooner or later they repost something about Merkel being bad to us, or idiotic pseudo economic conspiracy theories borrowed from a failed ex minister in Australia.   We will build a new consensus and a new idea about what it means to be Greek in the modern world.   One post at a time.   It’s not about living in Greece and it sure as hell isn’t about job security and living off loans.  If there is something special about this great civilisation it has nothing to fear of new technologies, new economies or alien invasions, Jews, Germans and whatever other imaginary enemy lazy Greeks imagine are all working against them.

    I hope Argyris quits his job in the civil service and finds something to do in the real world economy some time soon.    (Posting this on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter now, guess he will see it sooner or later.  ; )

     

  • Social media diet inspired by primitive, happy humans

    Heck, they do it all the time with eating habits.  Why not make a social media regime and sell it?   So here are my tips on how to be happier through changes in your social media habits.   All scientifically tested and based on decades of research:

    1. Eat everything.  Hunter gatherers where more gatherers than hunters.  Always on the look out for berries, or roots, or well, anything edible.   Do the same with your social media.  Don’t be picky which platform to use.  They all taste slightly different.  When you stumble on one, use it.
    2. Gorge on opportunities.  When a stone age wanderer found a tree full of fruit they didn’t sit around debating; they ate as much as possible before some other tribe of humans or monkeys came and ransacked everything.  When you find a new niche, milk it.  Getting a lot of likes for Einstein quotes?  Go for it!
    3. There are three ways of walking the earth.  Ancient nomads where mostly alone all day, with a very small troupe of relatives, 10-20 usually somewhere within shouting distance.  That is how they lived for days and months on end.  Occasions for meeting strangers or bigger gatherins where extremely rare. Emulate this in your use of social media.  Pick a platform for those really close and important to you.  Email, Google plus, ello, instagram, whatever.  Live there most of your day with them.
    4. Be vicious.  Our ancient ancestors were brutal.  Some killed newborns at a whim if they didn’t look nice.  Old people were knifed from behind if they couldn’t keep up, or just left up a mountain.  No regrets, just unfriend, block, send them to cyber heaven.
    5. Boldy go wherever there might be greener grass.  Our nomad ancestors never stopped exploring.   What’s that?  Snapchat?  Hell yeah, let’s try it.  No matter if it looks barren, heck they walked across miles of ice to get to America, you some sort of chicken?  Old places have stale opportunities, look for new vistas.
    6. Burn it all down.  When some enterprising bunch of sailors arrived at Australia 45 thousand years ago, they wiped out all but one of the large marsupials that roamed that continent.   They just burned down forests for fun.  Don’t save for tomorrow what you can use today.  That folder full of “good stuff I found to use some time”?   Well, the time is now.  Go for it.

    I could go on with more points but of course I am developing the idea in a book.  And series of seminars, world tour and self-help audio.  Because as my ancient primitive ancestors knew, everything has a price.  Trade wherever you can!