However, it had IE 6 on it. I needed to upgrade to IE 8. Easy, right? Nope.

Windows Update wasn’t working in IE6. NO UPGRADE.
The download link on the IE8 web page clicked to a download, but nothing downloaded – guess it didn’t support IE6 either. NO UPGRADE

I clicked around forever with no success. Maybe 30 minutes. Then I installed a security update to XP and it recommended IE7 – hallelujah! I followed that install and got IE7 working. Our apps worked and I moved on. (Ie8-less for now).

We all bitch about IE6, and while it’s a tiny percentage, Microsoft isn’t making it easy to kill off that browser. If I weren’t so motivated (and tech-saavy), we’d have another IE6 browser out there forever. Please MSFT, make it less frustrating to kill IE6, please test those flows for IE6 and get people off of it!

It turns out that merely getting into Harvard is as good an indicator of future success as actually going. It turns out that being the sort of person that can invest the effort, conquer fear and/or raise the money to capture some of the elite trappings of visible success is what drives success, not the other way around.

Via: Seths Blog: Do elite trappings create success? Causation vs. correlation.

Larry Ellison via Startup Quote.

Great quote, but easier said than done (by me) sometimes.

But — on the agencies spreadsheets — garbage inventory from garbage sites aggregated on garbage networks often shows a lower cost per click. Many web advertisers, even those that buy banners, treat it as a direct marketing medium.For premium media properties such as ours, this is a contest that should be avoided at all costs. Its a race to the bottom — for the lowest quality ads and the least valuable visitors.

via Why Gawker is moving beyond the blog.

Well, this spammer actually hotlinked the images off of the company’s server (instead of embedding a copy of the image). The smart company (Wellness Resources Inc.) just swapped out the image with their own message. See it here:

Kudos to the guys at Wellness Resources and I hope you all track them down.

Thanks for letting me share. Have you cleaning out your “I should blog about that” folder lately?

Case in point: today GoodRec launched – my former co-worker Mihir Shah gave an amazing demo at TechCrunch 50 and it really made me want to use the service. It really seems slick and I think they’ve got a nice user experience approach to the problem. So I did what all users do to validate such a service: looked in my own neighborhood first to see how good it was. And sadly, I saw listings for 3 businesses that closed over a year ago and one that closed 2.5 years ago. Ugh – that’s a horrible first impression of their product and I’m guessing its not their fault – just licensed data from somewhere.

But how, as an industry, do we solve this problem? There are a bizillion little startups like mine and like GoodRec and we all have the same problem: how do you stay up on all these businesses? CitySearch and Yelp have gotten enough users to keep up to date on it, google tries to crawl their way around it and other businesses (like mine) just try to stay super focused and instead of listing every last place, only listing the biggies and places recommended by users.

Is there a solution? Should there be an “open directory” of local businesses? The big guys certainly see their database as being an asset to be guarded, but what if every site could leverage a giant database for free in exchange for giving data updates / closure reports back to the collective? Then couldn’t all these local services win or lose not on data, but on the community or quality of the service they offer.

What do you think? Is there an easy solution? The people that license this data have so far proven they can’t keep up – so how do we solve this?

Cutting the fruit wasn’t a big deal to me – I wasn’t eating healthily, but for those that did – what a bad message to send.

But the real loss was Bagel Day; a great tradition – every Tuesday AM you would find people from all over the company surrounding the little wagon full of bagels. It was great and I got fat eating multiple bagels. But what was most fun was the social aspect. Lots of people chatting while waiting for a spot in the toaster. It was more than just free carbs, it was a way to connect. Ask any old Yahoo about bagel day and you are likely to get a smile.

Google has it’s own share of traditions, but one of the most publicized is how well they take care of employees. Free food, healthy snacks, drinks, candy and good childcare. They put a priority on making their people feel special.

Over dinner with a Googler (a father of a newborn), I heard frustration that he couldn’t afford the new only-for-the-millionaires childcare (that Valleywag covered here).

And today, also on Valleywag, I read about Google’s food cutbacks. The cutbacks make sense on paper, just have dinner in fewer buildings – why do you need 10 dinner choices. Valleywag again: Perks: Dinner saved for Google’s geeks. But I see this as the first step on a long road – utilization studies of which snack stands get the least usage, a charge for “premium” food maybe – doesn’t really matter. It’s just Google saying to their employees “our good treatment of you has its limits”.

Now, I’m not saying Google’s going out of business anytime soon, but I think it’s another inflection point in their growth. We’ve already seen lots of “the first wave” leave to do their own thing. Now, somebody is actually being “fiscally responsible” and looking for places to trim excess costs. Give it a couple of years and we’ll see more and more people complaining that “it’s just not as fun to work there anymore”. A natural evolution in any company, but a sad day for Googlers.

Last week, GayCities was mentioned in Hilary Howard’s Comings and Goings column in the Sunday Travel section of the New York Times. Unsurprisingly, traffic spiked immensely and many more people were introduced to the site than ever before. Obviously, I’m thrilled at the jump in traffic and overall traffic has stayed at a much higher level since our PR campaign in June.

But what is most interesting was the quality of the traffic. On that Sunday more users submitted reviews, blog post comments and new listing submissions than any other day in our history. And it was significantly more than proportional to the traffic increase. And these reviews were thoughtful, detailed and of high quality (not the “drive by shooting” type of reviews we’ll often see from Google searchers who land on the site).

This phenomenon isn’t new. People have talked about how Yahoo! Buzz has not only outpaced Digg in terms of traffic driven to a site, but that the quality of these more mainstream users is higher: they comment more and join a more thoughtful conversation. In many ways, people in the valley think that getting “dugg” or being written about on TechCrunch is of value – and for our launch it did help quite a bit, but I’m guessing we got a lot more people that are jaded by technology and just come by for a “looksee”. Our users from the Times were much more targeted and actually passionate about travel – clearly a better fit for a travel site and a good place to target future outreach.

And one last surprise, people who work in travel actually read travel publications. We got a number of sales leads from the Times – people looking to advertise with us. From TechCrunch, we got a lot of people trying to sell stuff to us.

Has your experience been the same?

Traffic keeps hitting all-time highs – Since the relaunch we keep having our “best traffic day ever” (this past Saturday hit yet another record). And more importantly, now even the worst traffic day is better than the record high prior to the launch. I like seeing that.

Making progress on the ad front – with our ad network, we pitched and won (and are running) a deal to promote the city of Toronto as a gay friendly destination. It involves sponsorship on the site, media on our site and co-marketing. We’re pitching the idea to a few other cities and a European country. There is a business here

Awaiting an amazing press mention – For our launch we got picked up by the SF Chronicle, TechCrunch (and re-syndicated on the Washington Post) and Inquisitor. Now we’re waiting for an mention to hit in a HUGE publication. I’m super excited about it, but don’t want to Jinx it until I see it in print. Stay tuned…

Starting hiring – The workload has gotten too much to handle, so I’ll be looking to build up the team. Initially I’m looking for a permanent part-time person to handle content updates/community management and for a full time jack-of-all-trades person to help run the business with me.

Thanks again for all the support. The rest of July we’re kicking off some marketing to small business owners, doing more marketing to consumers and setting up meetings with potential investors. It’s gonna be a busy summer.

With GayCities we’re developing the most comprehensive, user-friendly online travel community and city guide for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. We want to be the place to share invaluable insider information on where to go, eat, and stay wherever your travel.

I started the site after being disappointed in the lack of information online for the gay traveler. On a trip to Boston, I wanted to stay in a nice B&B in the South End and find out the most popular bars for gay men about my age. For the B&B, I turned to TripAdvisor only to be frustrated that there was no easy way to filter by “south end B&B”, and then when I did find places, I found it difficult to find opinions of people like me. Sadly, I even found a number of reviews that had veiled negative references to the clientele or owners. And when looking for nightlife I found almost nothing online and what I did find was out of date. And for a city the size of Boston, that shocked me. As I dug into it, I found that many cities suffer this same problem.

So GayCities was born. A gay city guide with comprehensive, up-to-date info about gay bars & clubs, restaurants, gay friendly hotels with reviews, photos, maps – all the stuff you’ve come to expect.

While reviews are the backbone of the site, today we’ve rolled out a bunch of great features. I’ll let you read about those over on the GayCities blog.

I’ve focused on bootstrapping to get to this point, but now I want to grow the site, add richer content and tell the world about it, so I’ll be seeking a round of friends/family/angel funding. If you are interested in participating (or know someone who would be) in this round, let me know.

You all have been so supportive to me through this process, and for that I am very thankful. There’s one more favor I have to ask – help me spread the word. Pass it on to your LGBT friends and link to http://www.gaycities.com/ from your blog or site – you know how Google/Yahoo love sites that are heavily linked to.

and P.S. over on the GayCities blog, I link to some of the press we’ve gotten (washington post, sf chronicle, techcrunch)…

Basically, my new site has a header element, that if you click open, it drops down like a drop down menu (floating over the content below) and fills itself with an iframe. Here are some mockups:

If you’re one of those guys/gals that finds this stuff super easy, can you give me a holler? I’ll buy you dinner if you can help me get unstuck (I’d much rather go to dinner than spend cash on a stranger). Comment here or drop me a mail at sgatz AT yahoo

I got married – Well, technically, Craig and I were “registered as a domestic partner under California state law” (maybe one day it’ll be called marriage). Even though we have been together for 15 years, we thought now would be a great time to make it “legal”. Craig and I spent the better part of the last few months planning a party for a small group of family and friends up in Napa. We had the most amazing weekend, the weather was spectacular, the food & wine was out-of-this-world and most important our closest friends and family joined us and had an amazing time. I wish I could re-live it every weekend.

I’ve been traveling – New York (2 times), Philadelphia, Baltimore, Palm Springs, and tons of weekend time up in Napa. I love to travel and to catch up with old friends, and I’ve been able to do that a bunch. While these trips have been mostly work related (see below), I made sure to add weekend time onto each trip to enjoy some quality time. And when you work on the internet you can work from anywhere. Have laptop…will travel.

Starting my own company – I’ve been working on and off since January on my new company. I’ve taken lots of meetings (including a number of excellent ones about partnerships), gotten lots of good advice and have solid progress on building out the site. It’s been fun and challenging and now that the wedding is over, it’s finally time to work full-time. My next steps: a launch in the next month or so and raising a friends/family/angel round to help prove out the model. More to come soon.

Taking care of myself – I’m finally going to the gym again and I hired a trainer to help me through it all. I already feel healthier, now onto looking good too!

I keep saying that I’ll be blogging more here and I really hope to as I work through the next phase of my career. I’ll keep sharing my thoughts, but more importantly, I’ll be asking questions and (hopefully) participating in the conversation.

From time to time, you’ll hear reports of the death of mainstream media. Newspapers are dying, radio is on the way out, network TV ratings have shrunk dramatically etc. In most studies we learn that people are spending more time online and less with the “old media”.

All of this is true, but only to a point. The power of television, in particular, to drive behavior is still quite stunning.

In 1981, MTV launched to very small audience with an old, not very popular song as their first video: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. Record stores reported large numbers of customers asking for the song and ordered up records to meet their customer’s needs. Record company execs started calling MTV asking how to get their videos on. A hit was made.

Now, 27 years later, we have plenty of internet stories that–while not quite that large–show that the internet has the potential to do the same. e.g. Fall Out Boy clamored itself up through Myspace.

Something this week caught my eye. Hallelujah, a 14 year old song from the late Jeff Buckley has been the #1 seller on iTunes for a week. There’s been no promotion in the iTunes store. How?

Well, an American Idol contestant sang an adequate cover of the song. And then, Simon Cowell mentioned that Jeff Buckley’s 1994 version is one of his favorite songs. From nowhere to #1 overnight.

I have yet to see an example where the internet has had that kind of impact that quickly. If you know of one, be sure to let me know, but I don’t see it. I guess that mainstream media business has got some legs after all…

Those comments where made about the last product I worked on at Yahoo: Yahoo! Live. I think it’s an addictive product and from what I hear users think so too – it could turn out to be the most successful Advanced Products team product.

What’s interesting is where those comments came from. Dan W pointed out this great post: Yahoo’s LIVE Deaf Chat Room! about how a group of deaf users were delighted by their experience on Y! Live. Those comments above were from this post and the commenters.

This wasn’t an accident. Eric Fixler on my team (and our intern Vibha Bamba) took the extra effort to research users with different kinds of abilities and what they would need in a product like Live. They brought blind, deaf, and physically challenged users into Yahoo and let them play with Y! Live. They listened to feedback, they researched how to make flash screen-reader ready. But most important: they just took the time to think it through: what would it be like for a deaf user to use Y! Live. Turns out that was a good move. I have a friend who is a sign language interpreter and he tells me that webcams are revolutionizing the way deaf people communicate. TTD is still around, but now people will just say get on skype to video conference. Much easier and faster.

I’m proud of the work that the team did (especially Eric and Vibha) and I’m so happy to see these kinds of posts.

So have you thought about how your product will work with all kinds of users?

UPDATE: I just noticed that Mike Quoc (the PM on Live) has a blog now. He linked to another similarly great post.

Yahoo! Live allows anyone to stream their own live channel. If YouTube is what happened (past tense), Live is what’s happening right now. Each channel comes with its own chat room and a “co-viewing” area where you can see the other people who are watching.

It’s a pretty amazing product (even in this early “experimental release” phase) and one of those products that the more that you play with it, the more you want to. They’ve also launched with ability to embed into your own site and a nice API.

I’m proud that I was a part of it and I’m incredibly proud of the team. From what I read, they are chasing after some bugs and the initial reaction was more than they thought (pretty amazing to max out your beta servers with zero official press mentions), but I’m confident they’ll work through all that. It’s a truly amazing team.

Read more Mike Quoc’s post at Yahoo! Next for the details.

And P.S. while the press is loving to Sh*t on Yahoo! these days, this team shows they can still launch an interesting, innovative product. And if rumors are to be believed, Microsoft is trying to buy Ustream for $50mm. I suggest they save the money – if the MSFT/YHOO thing goes through, you’ve got a great team raring to go!

Bill says:

What I love is how the technology completely takes over. It pops out and looks like it could hurt someone. Then it obscures the rest of the panelists. And finally Anderson is so enamored with trying to keep it from bursting again that he is using all his brain cycles to keep the 3D virtual pie chart on that silly piece of cardboard.

Bill makes me think of a metaphor I often use. Being a technologist is like being a film editor. I’m specifically thinking about personalization technologies but most technology has this paradigm.

If a film is edited well, the audience will talk about how the movie was exciting, dramatic, and the story just grabbed you – no one will say “that was a well edited film”. But if you do your job poorly, everyone will notice – “that was so choppy”, “the editing was off”, etc.

We need to remember that our job is to build technology that fades into the background so the user can focus on what really matters: the content, the community, their friends.

So I’m a very loyal Chase Bank customer, and I have been for over 15 years. I like them 1000x better then the west coast banks like BofA and Wells Fargo that charge fees to me where they bear no / very little cost. Don’t get me started about how BoFA charges me $3/transaction for using my ATM card – on top of what the ATM provider charges – in towns where there are no BofA ATMs. Paying $6 to take $60 out of my account is robbery. But I digress.

I got a notice in the mail from Chase saying (emphasis mine):

We are changing the way we manage our customer’s preferences…This change allows you more options to specify which mail offers you do not want to receive.

Now I’ve spoken my share of corporate-speak over the years, but it took me a minute to even understand this sentence. My first reaction: “thanks Chase! I really wanted more ways to tell you NO”. I’m surprised that they didn’t add on “our consumer research has told us that you like checking more boxes”.

But then came the real evil sentence (next to 9 checkboxes and a signature field):

unless you tell us otherwise, you may begin to receive offers in the mail about these products and services

So chase managed to take my “NO, nothing in the mail please”, and turned it into 9 separate yeses. I guess no really means yes if you work at a bank. This is exactly how companies get the bad reputations that they do. And now with most banks becoming megabanks, they can get away with it. Sad, really.

I’ll file this away in the “if you ever catch me wanting to do this, slap me” category.