GizmoLA.com

Z.com and I have parted ways. 1999 was a very tough year for dot-coms, and Z suffered during the economic down swing as did so many other companies. After a tremendously enjoyable and challenging year, it appears that the Z.com I knew and loved, was coming to an end, the victim of lean times in the online advertising market, and the complete retreat of the venture markets to invest in anything online. I'm not 100% sure what will happen to Z.com. As of now it still appears to be humming along, serving up entertainment. I wish Joe and Mike the best with Z, and of course I'll be rooting for it to survive in some capacity, or at least to see some of the great entertainment sites built at Z, reborn in acquisition. I will miss all the creative and talented people at Z. Oh yeah, and I need a job! :-(

Y2k is nearly over, as we boldy approach 2001, a space odyssey. Among the many milestones of the year, several friends became new parents. Companies rose and fell. The stock market imploded. Lawsuits were filed, and records were set.

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  Gizmo and Scrappy continue their whirlwind year. They were recently Cover boys on an album by local Jazz musicians "Laurel Canyon Radio Company".
  Click on the image to check out their site, which has some interesting information regarding Laurel Canyon and more about their albums, which are for sale nationally. The album has a canine theme, in that the songs are about dogs and their owners in both the literal and allegorical sense. Gizmo and Scrappy are scheduled to appear in a book of photography due out some time in the future. We should have more details later.
  If I can get a scanner hooked up I'll try and post some of the proofs.


• My Experiments with Audiocasting continue. From time to time I'll run a relayed streaming mp3 channel on Live365. I've stayed with the Alternapop.net domain. If it's running, you can stream it using an mp3 player like winamp. The playlist has over 500 songs in it pulled from my music collection. Try clicking here and if it's up, you should get the station.

Z.com continues to grow. We successfully launched the new Zhomesite, code name Z2home, and it came out pretty well. We built a publishing system run on coldfusion, Win2k servers and Oracle database to support it, and I'm working on enhancing the ad serving piece of it. I need some sleep. Anyways, check it out at http://www.z.com

• Z.com "soft launched with 20 something sites at the end of May. Since then, we've had millions of page views, so things are going pretty well. Check out the site if you haven't. Among other cool things are animations from The Synj, Monsters in my Tummy, with monster e-cards
  to send to that certain someone who screwed you over, and the animated Rotten Fruit, which has lots of funny dirty english phrases.


• I created a new GizmoLA masthead, as you probably noticed. It's
  a view from the opposite side of Grand View Drive, looking towards
  downtown LA. I took a couple of photo's on a clear day. Here's what the photo looked like originally:
  
  

The new Comedy.com launched last week. Check it out at www.comedy.com.