Alexander Chalkidis

Tag: Blog

  • Why Google wants to stop me blogging

    If you are posting original content on Facebook or Twitter, you’re stupid.  No polite way to put it.   You’re an idiot.   Every day I see great thoughts, photos and other inspiring original content posted on Facebook and it makes me cringe.   It is like cooking an interesting organic and original meal and then giving it away to McDonald’s to sell for you.   It is also inexcusable because there are so many easy ways around it.

    When blogging started it was just that.   Blogging.   Horrible aesthetics for web logs= very rough diary like things.   But now you have Tumblr and all sorts of prettier choices.   You can put your stuff in your website and then get it to automatically update Facebook, Twitter or almost anything else you want.   But you control the environment in which your content lives and breathes.   You organise it as you want it presented, not as Facebook deems best in its latest incarnation.

    Yeah, even those witty one liners you are posting on Twitter.   Post them in your world and then think where you are distributing them.

    There is however a larger picture on this issue.   And that is that even Google is keen to stop you blogging.   The demise of the blogger.com platform is intentional.   Because if you are controlling a “castle” of a blog with all your information and all it’s unique traffic, they can’t make money out of it as easily.   You might even start to want to sell banners yourself!  Facebook and Google+ or Twitter are in effect using you as slave journalists and content producers.   They make the interface and the media chanel, you provide the content.   Sure, loads of it is rubbish, but even rubbish provides really useful data about how you, and your friends, think.   What they like, what they shop, where they go.

    Blogger isn’t one of Google’s failures.   It was useful when it started and now it is purposely being winded down.   They don’t completely cancel the service as it provides useful information.   And WordPress would simply be too powerful if left unchecked.    But now they want most of you to start working for them for free on Google+…

     

  • Corporate psychoanalysis through the company blog

    My friend is a damn good designer.  He has worked for the biggest furniture manufacturer’s and other luminary positions that an industrial designer can achieve including his own lab.   Anything from unique desk systems, to an incredible invention that helps the Athens Hilton fold their tables more efficiently or a sea kayak.  But what exactly is he?

    You could call it a mid life crisis.   Too vague and emotionally laden for me.   In corporate terms he is in danger of becoming a jack of all trades.  In his own mind. He needs to focus on less to achieve more.   I have seen companies do this at fancy retreats, with or without gurus like me to assist them.   They run around an assault course, dive backwards into the teams arms, raft down the river, party like maniacs and somehow reinvigorate their common idea of what the enterprise is all about.

    Blogging is like all that only better.   OK, I am a blogging junky.   It is not so much that I have a compulsive need to blog all the time so much.   It is more that I see blogging as the solution to more and more corporate ails. I threw www.benakis.info at my friend with some sample content.   Like most companies, he wasn’t sure what to do with it.   Then, some time later, the phone calls started:   “How can I change that?”, “do you think we should add this?” and “how would Twitter fit into all of it?”

    I haven’t yet seen his first post.   That, to me, is the “bingo” moment of triumph.   Because it means that he has found his public voice.   He has imagined an audience and spoken to it.   For anyone that is an expert in their own field, the content is easy once you achieve this first step.   An excellent example is www.yalosbranding.com which I am proud to say I didn’t write a single word of.   OK, they are branding specialists, it is their job to know what to project.   But I simply enabled the technology for them to transfer this know-how to a new medium.   I was just watching  and applauding, reassuring  as much as possible when necessary.   Through this process they are rediscovering their relevance to an international market.

    Google, customers and everything else will fall into place.