Here we see a very young me (I’m pretty sure I’m four years old) with my sister Karin (who would have been 23).
Don’t we look young and happy and (at least in my case) sun-stroked?
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Me Me Me
I almost forgot to mention that today is the 15th anniversary of schafer.com.
I registered the domain for personal use back in 1996 and it’s had something on it pretty much ever since. It’s been a resume for me, a list of links, a corporate site for while I was self-employeed for many years, and since 2001 it’s had a blog attached to it (my first blog post was July 4th, 2001).
Interestingly enough, and entirely coincidentally, today is also my fourth anniversary on Twitter.
I wonder what the Internet will look like fifteen years from now?
When did you buy your first domain name and what did you do with it when you first started out online?
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One clear result of the rise of Twitter and Facebook is the ever-growing number of abandoned blogs out there.
Blogs have always had a high abandon rate. It's "cool" (well it was) to have a blog and it's dirt simple to start one. Much harder is the task of keeping it fed. Coming up with interesting topics to post about and then adding in images and links to make the "story" feel fleshed out is a lot of work.
Twitter on the other hand requires less than 140 characters, and if you don't have time to type 140 characters 3 or 4 times a day, you've got bigger problems than your posting schedule.
For many people blogs are/where a way of pointing at interesting articles. Much of the verbiage beyond the link and maybe some quoted text from the original was just through clearing, filler or "I agree with this" commentary of little value.
Twitter makes that kind of post seem terribly outdated. If I want to POINT to something now I just post it to Twitter and add a short, (hopefully) pithy reason why I think the link has merit and I'm done.
That means that "blog posts" now end up feeling like work. They are "longer" and "original". And that's a tall order for many of us.
This blog, my first one, (although it's lived on Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and now TypePad) is still what I officially call home online even though I don't visit very often. My first post was over eight years ago now. In that time I've done a fair number of those "long format" posts interspersed with lots of stuff that now seems better suited for other social network channels, particularly Twitter.
Why blog then?
I'm not giving up on this blog yet as I figure I WILL have more to say than will fit in 140 characters at some point, but I doubt my close identification with my blog will ever return.
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I just checked my calendar to see what my week was like and nearly fainted:
I never have weeks like this.
We’re not big on “standing meetings” at Tucows but I do like to make time to sit down with all my direct reports at least once a week. And I do the same with the Exec Team and Elliot. After that the rest of the week fills in pretty quickly with project-related meetings, sprint reviews, vendor discussions, customers time, and so on.
Loads of people are travelling on business or sick this week so my schedule is extremely light. Now, to be clear, this won’t last. By the end of the week much of it will have filled in.
But still, it makes me realize how little time I often end up with to “do” stuff instead of talking about doing stuff. I look forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting some projects of my own going this week.
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Earlier this week I was quoted in an IT Business article about the possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft.
Here’s what I had to say:
The two main things going for Yahoo is brand and massive audience, said Ken Schafer, vice-president of product management and marketing for Tucows Inc.
Tucows began as a domain name registrar in the early 1990s but quickly transformed itself into a service and software vendor for Web hosting firms and Internet service providers.
“Yahoo’s problem is it has had a hard time in finding out how to leverage its main assets,” Schafer said. “Yahoo was not able to execute as quickly as people had been hoping it would.”
Schafer said Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo did not come as a surprise, as people in the online marketing industry had been talking about its possibility for years.
“Personally, I hope they manage to pull it off. Competition means innovation, and the more competition, the better.”
I’m not sure that history will prove me out. Right now it looks like Yahoo!’s board is prepared to put up a fight to keep the company out of Steve Balmer’s hands (or at least to make him pay dearly for the honour).
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(I got a poem from Lucy for Christmas and – with her permission – I’m sharing it here)
Twas the night before Tucows, launched their domains,
Ken Schafer was stirring, simply going insane;
The plans were all there, displayed on his macable,
In hopes that domains, will soon be unhackable;
The macs were all snoozing, with screen savers in sight,
While visions of starbursts, were haunting him all night;
With Ken in his office, and Elliot abroad,
He was checking the URLs that seamed slightly odd,
When out on the roof there arose such a clatter,
Ken sprang from his desk to see what was the matter.
Away to the window he flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the slush, that covered Mowat,
Gave a dinghy appearance to objects below it,
When, what to his wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight cows, instead of reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
Ken knew in a moment it must be St. Click.
More rapid than elephants his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
“Now, Betsy! now, Martha! now, Ilsa and Daisy!
On, Patches! on Ellie! on, Moo Moo and Lazy!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now clop away! clop away! clop away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an awkward, mount to the sky,
So up to the office roof the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of hard drives, and St. Click too.
And then, in a twinkling, he heard on the roof
The stomping and Clacking of each little hoof.
As Ken drew in his hand, and was turning around,
Down the heating vent St. Click came with a bound.
He was dressed all in red, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of hard drives he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.
His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a truffle,
And the beard of his chin was as white as his shuffle;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And Ken laughed when he saw him, in spite of himself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Soon gave Ken to know he had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And filled all the offices; then turned with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
And giving a nod, up the heating vent he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!
This is the second Internet/Ken-related poem I’ve been fortunate enough to receive, following my mom’s poem a few years ago.
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It looks like everything is moving smoothly post migration to Typepad. DNS propagation took longer than I expected but my goals was to have everything in place for the end of the year and it looks like that is the case.
I’m sure I’ll be fiddling more with the look of the site and with tweaking the content, but I’m pretty happy with the results even as they are now.
Let me know if anything looks funny or is broken from your end!
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I took a few hours this morning to move all the posts I did on the WordPress version of my blog over the last six months to this TypePad version of the blog.
I’m pretty happy with the move (back) to Typepad and I’m looking forward to playing with the site again (something I couldn’t do with WordPress because it really needs to you to understand basic coding to get things looking the way you want).
Next step is to update DNS to point here to make it all official.
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Nestor E. Arellano (the “E” is to avoid him getting confused with all the other Nestor Arellanos out there – sorry Nestor I couldn’t resist) interviewed me on Thursday for an ITBusiness.ca article called “Good Vibes Stem The Tide Of Talent Turnover”.
One of the things I’ve learned as a manager is that my team has to understand why they are doing what they are doing, see challenge in the work, and enjoy the physical act of working (i.e. like the people and environment the work gets done in). If you don’t get those right, it’s very tough to keep anyone engaged. If they’re not engaged, they might stick around if times are tough but given options (as people most definitely are being given right now), they won’t stick around for long.
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When I started healthyken.com I didn’t think that anyone would really read it, let alone want to comment on the details of my eating habits. Turns out though that folks are reading it and quite a few have commented on the fact that they want to comment. Unfortunately tumblr doesn’t allow for comments and I’m still not sure I want to move my health posts to this “official” blog.
Therefore I’m opening up a comment thread below for anyone who wants to comment on anything they read over at healthyken.com.
Enjoy!
Update 2007-12-26: I changed my blogging platform at the end of 2007 and unfortunately one of the things lost in the move were the 23 wonderful comments people had left on this post. Thanks for all the encouragement folks! You know who you are!
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I decided not to clutter up this (ahem) “official” Ken Schafer Blog with details of my progress on going from Fat F__k to Healthy Ken, but if you are interested in my plan and how I’m doing on it, you can find all the details at healthyken.com.
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Well, that took much longer than I thought!
Since I sold One Degree a few months ago I’ve been on a blogging sabbatical. My goal has been to reboot the blog I ran at schafer.com from 2001 until 2005 and at the same time bring together a lot of the scraps I’ve left littered around various other blogging outposts since then.
With a little help from James I’ve managed to get the settled in here pretty nicely – once I put my mind to it.
So consider this a “Hello Again World” post!
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