^[1]The last hour and a half has been an exercise in frustration.

I spent most of it freaking out as I tried to connect to today’s webinar ^[2] and listening to busy signals and dropped audio on my laptop’s speakers. The rest of the time I spent on hold waiting for technical support at GotoWebinar ^[3], the company whose technology we were hoping would power future ERE webinars.

We will not be using them again.

The virtual meeting room that we used was supposed to hold up to 1,000 people, and since we regularly get large groups of 500 or more on our calls this was important. This time, we hit 250 listeners on the call when the problems began.

GotoWebinar has no emergency line, and when I finally got through to them I was informed that they were “already investigating issues with that phone number.” When I asked to speak to a manager and said that it was urgent, I was asked for my number and told that I would get a call back. They did not ask for my name, and I am still waiting for the call.

My apologies to every person who was on the call and experienced the poor audio quality.

My apologies to those who could not even make it on to the call because they got busy signals when they dialed in.

Especially, my apologies to Jeremy ^[4] and Dan ^[5] who soldiered on through the webinar in spite of the technical issues — they behaved like the pros that they are and did not miss a beat.

Update: 1/29/09

Jeremy and Dan have been gracious enough to offer to repeat the webinar on Friday, February 6 at 2:00 PM EST. Register here. ^[6]

Also make sure to check out the slides and a re-recording of the presentation below!