Daddyo.com as it appeared
10 years agoIt’s human nature to chop the world into neat decade demarcations, and with the September 11th media feeding frenzy as a backdrop, I recently realized that it’s been 10 years now since I converted Daddyo.com over to being a blog.
As is the case with all our lives, much has changed in the past 10 years. In the fall of 2001 I had my dream job at Borders.com where I was able to combine my music career with my passion for Internet technology. When the fatally short sited Borders CEO decided to hand our website over to our arch competitor Amazon, I brazenly predicted that in 10 years Borders would be dead. Last weekend Carrie and I ventured to Borders store #1 here in Ann Arbor for what will be the last time ever. Little did I expect that my pronouncement from a decade before would actually come to fruition and that the handing over of Borders.com to Amazon would truly be the point at which the once mighty Border started to die.
10 years ago my two children were still small and actually did what I asked them to do. My daughter was entering fifth grade and her little brother was entering second grade. Standing next to each other in the photo I always took on the first day of school, she had a good four inches on him. Now my daughter is entering her junior year as a drama student at NYU and my son is a 6’3″ senior in high school. Needless to say, he towers above his sister and everyone else in the family.
It was in August 2001 that I transitioned the dormant domain that had once been home to my web design consultancy to life as a blog. Started on the cusp of life before wartime, it was an interesting time to start communicating to the world via a blog. Daddyo the blog gave me a platform to pontificate with posts on topics as heavy as the American military actions that were on the horizon, and posts that were merely links to cool sites that caught my eye.
10 years ago Daddyo the blog gave me the ability to share with my friends and strangers alike, not only what I thought, but what I was listening to and reading. It felt like pretty cool stuff. Years before social networking would transform our lives, the blog was my own personal social squawk box where I could both talk to my friends and take down a vendor who I felt had done me wrong.
With Facebook at the center of the online communication universe for my family and friends, it’s worthwhile asking whether blogging is still a valid tool in the personal communication tool belt. The answer to that one is an easy yes!, blogs still play a vital role. Facebook and other social tools are perhaps the best place to broadcast tidbits – quick thoughts and cool websites, but a blog is still an amazing platform for long-form communication. It’s a tool where you can communicate more than 140 words at a time, it’s a place where people come looking when they want to hear your written voice.
While these days Daddyo the blog is mostly a home for my podcast Broadcasting From Home, it’s still a communication platform I cherish. It’s my own little sandbox where I can talk, broadcast, and play to my heart’s content. Soon I think I’ll start a series of posts on my favorite things, so y’all come back now, ya hear.