Ken Schafer

How To Agree?

Paul Graham just wrote a wonderful overview of how to disagree. Go read it. I'll wait.

My guess is this was spurred by a mildly controversial post he did a few days earlier called You Weren't Meant To Have A Boss which was widely commented on.

I don't disagree with Paul. In fact I whole-heartedly agree with him.

And that's my problem. Paul didn't tell me "How To Agree". As he points out:

The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.

This post is an attempt to "agree and say something" but it is, frankly, work.

What I'd love to have is a way of saying "+1" or "I agree" or "count me in" or "what he said" or what have you.

I do this right now in subtle and ineffective ways. I bookmark a link on Delicious or Twitter it or send it via email to people who might care that I agree. But it sure would be nice to have a centralized place where we could all saying "I Agree" and just link with (or without comment) to stuff we think is correct and of value.

My short-term solution to this problem is to create a Delicious tag called "I Agree" that I'll try to use for stuff I find that I just agree with. I say "try" because it's damn hard to introduce new behaviours - even self-imposed ones - so no promises.

(photo credit)

Crossroads Producers Killed Mary Barclay

I hadn't heard of Mary Barclay before stumbling across her obituary by the BBC.

While I know nothing about her other than what I read today I can't help thinking she'd get a good laugh from the unfortunate juxtaposition of the headline and caption in her obit:

I'm sure it wasn't overzealous Crossroads producers deciding to have a hit put out on the nonagenarian but that was my first thought.

Adding Disqus To Schafer.com

Earlier this week I was reading a post on Fred Wilson's blog and clued in to the fact that he's been using Disqus as a substitute for the TypePad commenting system he used in the past.

I really liked the Disqus approach to commenting and, given that this blog runs on TypePad as well, I thought I'd give it a try.

If I did my template manipulation correctly based on Disqus' very easy-to-grok walkthrough, we should now have a new and improved commenting system here. I'd love it if you could try it out and let me know what you think.

The experience is really enhanced if you add your pic to your Disqus account as it will automatically pop up beside your comment - here and on other Disqus enabled sites.

Feel free to experiment in the comment thread below.

I Go On The Record About Microhoo

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).

Hit Me On My iPhone

Man I love the Internet.

(found via tuaw)

Testing "Post To The Future"

I'm not sure if TypePad allows you to "post to the future" (by that I mean set a time and date before which a post should not be visible, but once the time comes, the post publishes as if you hit "publish" right then).

I set this post to publish one hour AFTER I actually finished it.

Let's see what happens.

Trying Out Ecto

I've generally just done my blog posts in directly in the web interface of whatever application I'm using at the moment, but I've always been interested in using an offline editor. I'm trying Ecto right now to see if I can make it work. If not, it's back to the web for me.

My Super-Clean Inbox

Over the holidays I took some time to rethink my inbox strategy and I thought I'd share my current approach with you.

For reference, that's my brand-spankin'-new inbox you're seein' here.

IMAP
I'm now using IMAP for work and home accounts. Up until now I've been a POP-guy - more out of habit than anything else. With POP you check your mail server and download anything new since the last time you checked. Typically the server then deletes its copy and what you downloaded becomes the only version you've got.

IMAP is wonderful as it allows you to keep all your messages on the server ("in the cloud") and pull down synchronized copies on as many machines as you'd like (as well as checking messages via webmail). Essentially you're doing everything on the server and just keeping local copies for back-up and offline use. This is much safer and much more convenient.

Providers
My "Work" account is (naturally) my Tucows email account running on the Tucows Email Service (yes we "eat our own dog food"). For my "Personal" mail I'm trying Google Hosted Apps for comparison purposes. I also have a separate Tucows Email Service-based address via Domain Direct for a domain I host there but haven't actively started using.

Folder Strategy
As you can see from the screenshot, I'm going for extreme simplicity. Besides the default Inbox, Draft, Sent, Trash, and Junk folders that come with both accounts, I have only added three folders to manage my messages - Actionable, Archived, and Waiting For Reply.

Zero Inbox
I use (and have for many years now) used a "Zero Inbox" approach as recommended by Merlin Mann.

I process email through-out the day, dealing with each message in turn.

1. Things I don't need to act on and can't imagine ever needing to reference again, I delete.

2. Things I don't need to act on that might (even remotely) be of use someday gets dragged to the "Archived" folder associated with the account.

3. Messages that require action but will only take a few minutes to resolve get dealt with immediately. The original message gets Archived.

4. Messages that will take more effort than I have time for are marked Unread and moved to the Actionable folder associated with the account. That means that I have a clean inbox and two folders that show the count of things I need to work on related to each role in life. In my example here you can see I've got 16 work-related messages and 2 personal messages I need to deal with. I tackle these as quickly as I can but within the context of other daily priorities so I don't let my inbox drive me.

5. Any time I send a message that I expect a reply to, I drag the sent message to my Waiting For Reply folder. I check this every few days and follow-up with the recipient if they didn't get back to me in a reasonable amount of time.

"Read The Feed"
One of the best things about moving to OS X Leopard is getting my RSS feeds directly in Apple Mail.

As you can see here, I subscribe to a bunch of feeds and group them in folders by theme so that I can check feeds in context as I have time.

"On My Mac"
One compromise on my system is this small group of folders (closed in this screenshot as they usually are in real life) that contain messages I downloaded via POP but haven't bothered to re-upload to the new IMAP Archived folders. I have about 30,000 non-IMAP message that I can search via Apple Mail if I need to reference them, but otherwise they're out of sight and mind in this closed folder list.

That's it. I'd be interested in how others are dealing with their inboxes these days or in answering any questions folks have about my system. It works for me but (as always) your mileage may vary.

Dear Podcasters - I'm Not Listening

I have a very long commute to Tucows every weekday. I generally spend two and a half to three hours in the car each day. Crazy, I know. But my family loves our little village (as do I) and the commute is just a fact of life.

Rather than resign myself to losing 10 to 15 hours every week to mindless FM radio, I decided I'd use the time a little more constructively. For the first year and a half of commuting I listened pretty much exclusively to podcasts in the car. This was great. I listened to Across The Sound, For Immediate Release, Daily Searchcast, Six Pixels of Separation, Marketing Martini and several podcasts each from CBC, New York Times, and Slate. I highly recommend all of them.

But after a while I realized the the signal to noise ratio on podcasts was leaving me frustrated. To much "welcome from..." and "here's how you can subscribe..." and "to recap last week...", and "here's what I'm doing/did/won't do...". It was information for sure, but not information that was useful or enriching - and that was kind of the whole point.

I also found that most podcasts suffer from diminishing returns. Once I'm inside the head of a podcaster and understand their world-view I get less and less from each new podcast. But finding new podcasts is a daunting task that can't be done in the car, so I kept listening to the same podcasts despite the decline in useful insights per hour in the car.

Then a few months ago I basically flipped a switch and decided my commute would be filled with audiobooks and it has been a wonderful, revelatory experience. I'm now consuming one or two books a week. I'm tackling business, science, modern fiction, and classics.

Essentially audiobooks act are incredibly high signal-to-noise podcasts. Or maybe more accurately, books are like really poorly written and produced audiobooks.

So sorry podcasters, until you figure out how to compete with Harper Lee, Walter Isaacson, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, Bill Bryson, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and Chip & Dan Heath I don't think I'll be listening anymore.

Did I Really Say "Good Vibes"?

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.

Mathematics and Social Networks

That title is entirely aimed at getting my geekier readers to see this joke Zoe and I came up with.

Zoe: "I can't believe Dylan would rather hang out with one sixth grader than three 8th graders."

Dad: "I guess that means that he thinks you're in Grade Two."

Zoe: "Wah?"

Dad: "Well, do the math."

1. 3 x Grade8 = 1 x Grade6
2. Grade8 = 1/3 x Grade6
3. Grade8 = Grade2

Zoe: "Great Dad, why don't you just blog about it instead of teasing me."

No Jesse, We Can't Be Friends

Just Showing Off My Blog

I'm showing my class how to blog.  Once I post this they will TOTALLY get it.