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If you look to your right, and down the page a bit you’ll notice something called "sidebar". That’s all the links I find around the web that I want to share with you.  I’m doing this by posting a sub-feed from my del.icio.us account so that the whole thing is seemless seamless. Ooh, seemless seamless.  Sweet.

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I’m totally excited about the eventual release of Will Wright’s Spore.  This is going to be SO cool.  The kids and I have had great fun with open ended video games and this looks like it will top everything else we’ve tried to date.

I’m also loving the way YouTube and Google Video allow you to embed their video on my site!

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I’ve been blogging for a long time (well a long time for a new communication tool, not long time as in "the long now" long).  My first "hello world post" was on July 4th, 2001.

Between then and last year about now I blogged on a semi-regular basis and managed to get about 430 posts online during that time.

Then I started One Degree and for all intents and purposes stopped my personal blog.  Slowly the old schafer.com was falling apart as more of my attention went to One Degree.  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and I ripped the site down and replaced it with some minimalistic pages about me and what I do.  But because my blog still used Blogger software for the back end it was just too much to contemplate a total overhaul given my infrequent posting.

Now that I’ve joined Tucows I really want to move schafer.com away from being a business site towards being my personal site.

So, here’s how I’m hoping it will work out:

• Here – Stuff about me, personal observations, asides, family and life stuff, capturing ideas, working through problems in public, etc.
• There – One Degree is a group effort focussed entirely on Internet marketing, particularly in Canada, so most of my writing on that topic will be done over there.

My guess is I’ll also be running a Tucows blog of some sort – I can’t imagine I wouldn’t – but you’ll have to wait to find out more about that.

Any thoughts on the mix of "official" and "personal" blogging?

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I haven’t been posting much over the last few months and most likely it will continue that way.

Three reasons for this:

1. Business is great! I’ve got more clients already this year than this time last year, and last year was our biggest to date. It’s great to be busy but it does cut into much needed blogging time. This seems to be a trend.

2. I’m cheating on myself! I’ve set up a side project called One Degree (where Canadian online professionals gather) and most of my time and attention have gone to the care and feeding of that site. If you are looking for regular posts from me, go there.

3. I’m spoiled! One Degree is built using Movable Type and it is so nice having a full-fledged blogging system in place. This site uses Blogger and has since launch, but the service is so limited that I have outgrown it. At some point this site will be redone using Movable Type, but that will have to wait for a while as I attend to these other burning issues.

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Over the holidays we got my mother online with an old desktop PC we had kicking around and broadband. She’s taken to it like a duck to water.

Ever since I was very young (and maybe before) my mother has always written poems about things that happen in her life. She just e-mailed me this:

Ready for a challenge? You bet!
I am going on the INTERNET,
flying into Cyberspace,
joining the computer race.

My kids, very generously,
provided the opportunity.
Installed by Ken, the computer pro,
here I am, ready to go.

So many questions I had to ask!
Am I really up to the task?
But Ken, with his expertise,
quickly put my doubts at ease.

Compose Email, click to “Send”
converse with family and friend.
For info, the website is a treasure,
finding answers a real pleasure.

Here I am now with my biggest toy,
having fun, so much joy.
I wonder, should it be told,
that I am 84 years old?

Ilse Schaefer
February 19, 2005

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Canada Post is about to launch Fetch. The site is now live at www.fetch4.info.

There was a brief Globetechnology article about the fact that Fetch is being piloted in Calgary (which is somewhat unusual).

This quote from the article does a good job of explaining the service at a very high level.

“The Fetch service allows a user to set up an account with Canada Post, and input personal contact information in confidence. When users see an advertisement from a company participating in Fetch, they request that information be sent to that on-line account, either by entering a text message on a cellphone, or through an interactive voice system.

Advertisers would pay only when a consumer requests one of their offers, and individuals would pay nothing for the service.”

Congrats to Warren and Tim for getting this off the ground after a huge amount of internal work.

It will be very interesting to see how this turns out. My guess is it will be a fundamentally new way of protecting consumer privacy while letting marketing through the veil, or it will be a flop. I doubt there is a half-way for this type of model. I’m hoping for the former as I like the idea of bringing greater interactivity to the offline environment.

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Kevin Lee has a very nice overview of the difference between SEO and SEM in his ClickZ article Compare and Contrast: SEM and SEO. I particularly like his analysis that SEO is largely a technical issue of site visibility (a fixed task) followed by ongoing PR and reputation management (an ongoing, evolving effort).

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I’ll be attending SXSW Interactive in Austin this year and I’m really looking forward to it. What an amazing line-up of speakers – it reads like my FeedDemon feed list!

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Happy New Year!

Here are a few of the top trends I’ll be watching closely in 2005:

1. “Web First” Marketing Strategies – Forget integrating online into the marketing mix, I’m seeing more smart companies starting with the web and working out from there. For some of my clients this will be the first year where they have moved almost all their efforts (and dollars) to the web. Look for offline media to play a supporting role for many more savvy marketers in 2005. And look for web AORs to take the lead as other agencies fall in line with the online strategies set by the web shop.

2. Rich Internet Applications – With Gmail, Flickr, Basecamp, Bloglines, and the brand new 43 Things I think we are really seeing the dawning of a whole new class of online experience. By bringing far greater functionality to their sites, these services are showing that online applications can rival desktop apps. I think 2005 will see a blurring and stretching of our concept of what the terms site and software mean. Look for ways to turn content sites into tools that users can use instead of read.

3. Desktop Apps – The flip-side of the web-based applications trend is the rise of net-centric desktop apps. Think of iTunes and RealRhapsody, FeedDemon, or Google’s Desktop Search. 2005 will also see more sites creating custom Firefox extensions and IE toolbars to keep top-of-mind with consumers. Don’t expect all your marketing to happen in a browser or e-mail client anymore.

4. Firefox – With over 15 million downloads since November 9th, the best web browser on the planet will stir things up as it rapidly gains marketshare on the old, buggy, unsecure Internet Explorer. One of my clients (with a non-tech audience) had over 8% of December traffic arriving via this open source app. This makes the move to standards-compliant sites even more essential as “IE Only” sites will alienate too many visitors to be worth the risk. As a side-note, let’s see if heads roll over the dreadful non-standards redesign of Indigo’s site.

5. RSS Hits Mainstream – Feeds were the hot tech topic in 2004 and 2005 will find this incredibly powerful tool gaining broader awareness. If you’re not using a feed reader to stay on top of the industry already, you are definitely missing the boat, and if you are not thinking about a corporate strategy to benefit from feeds in 2005, then shame on you.

Of course search will be the online marketing success story for 2005 as it was for 2004, and blogs will continue to grow in importance.

What do you see for 2005?

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“Raise a lot of money for me, I’ll give you good architecture. Raise even more money, I’ll make the architecture disappear.” MoMA’s architect Yoshio Taniguchi

(via kottke.org)

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Last year I published some predictions for 2004 on my blog on on the AIMS discussion list.

Here’s a summary:

1. SEM rises to dominate online marketing.

2. Blogs become the best way to find out about most stuff.

3. Increased focus on meeting user needs instead of corporate goals.

4. A more pragmatic approach to e-mail.

5. RSS prepares to take centre stage in 2005.

6. Social Networks will have a make or break year in 2004.

I’m feeling pretty good about these predictions a year later. Most of this rings true to me, but I was assuming a “make” year for social networks when in hindsight I think it was more of a “break”.

What do you think the trends of 2005 will be? More of the same, or are we ready for some breakthroughs?

(I think the big trend I missed was that business was going to boom! At the end of 2003 things still seemed kind of gloomy, but 2004 turned out to be a stellar year for my business and hopefully for yours.)

In a few days I’ll provide my predictions for trends in 2005.

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“Psychicle” got to see the Mark Lombardi exhibit at the AGO but I didn’t, because it ended a few days ago. This makes me sad as I really wanted to see his work up close.

Interestingly enough, without psychicle’s flickr photo, I wouldn’t have even know there was an exhibit in town.

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Jakob Nielsen’s most recent Alertbox entitled Most Hated Advertising Techniquesprovides some hard data on what many of us have known for a while now – aggressive online ads alienate site visitors out of proportion with the potential upside of clickthroughs.

Here’s a particularly relevant part of the article:

“Users have started to defend themselves against pop-ups. The percentage of users who report using pop-up or ad-blocking software increased from 26% in April 2003 to 69% in September 2004, which is an astonishing growth rate.

Users not only dislike pop-ups, they transfer their dislike to the advertisers behind the ad and to the website that exposed them to it. In a survey of 18,808 users, more than 50% reported that a pop-up ad affected their opinion of the advertiser very negatively and nearly 40% reported that it affected their opinion of the website very negatively.”

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Okay, Wired’s Roads Gone Wild article is now available online.

I quite enjoyed this article although the thought of curbless, signless intersections with fountains in the middle is a bit disturbing.

I loved this quote, which I think also represents wise words for web teams: “‘The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,’ Monderman says. ‘To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.’”

However, I wouldn’t try to overanalyze this article from a web user experience perspective as the basic concept of the article (that you should make people stop and think so they don’t mindlessly kill themselves) doesn’t apply to the web. Online you want to remove stuff from your site so there is less thinking thinking to do, not more. Since no one gets hurt if a user is going racing through your site, design to help avoid thinking as much as possible.

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