Jay Small's blog

Cordillera Interactive anticipates adding some new positions in our Saint Paul, MN headquarters:

• Interactive User Experience/Creative Manager
• Web/Interactive Production Designer
• Interactive Ad Operations Specialist

For those of you beyond commuting range of the Twin Cities, I'm sorry to say we won't pay relocation for any of these jobs. Application instructions are in the job postings -- please follow them!

It should not be difficult, slow or aggravating to use the website of a leading virtual fax service (eFax) to cancel a $16.95/month account. But it is all three.

For starters, you can't just fill out a form and cancel. Ugh! Anytime you enter a customer service web interface and find that canceling or downgrading an account requires either a phone call or an online chat session, beware. You are being "upsold" or "retention sold." (Newspaper companies, my old stomping grounds, maddeningly do this all the time. Want to subscribe online? Sure. Want to put in a vacation hold? Sure. Change your address? Absolutely. Want to cancel? WTF?)

Lots of lessons about what not to do in my chat transcript with eFax, which follows. Note that this is not the entire conversation -- I did not include two false starts with chat hosts who pointed me to a dead web page and then suddenly logged off. This is just the final attempt:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.

Sorry, nits. Meet your picker.

It bugs me (yes, puny play on words intended) to hear leaders of legacy media businesses refer to their "digital" strategies or products, meaning all their online/internet/web/social/mobile stuff.

How did "interactive," as the adjective of choice for such stuff, lose favor? It is both more accurate and more aspirational.

I run the interactive business for a group of local television stations. TV, in case you have been off the grid for the past decade or so, is now almost fully a digital business.

Before this job, I helped run the interactive team for a chain of newspapers. By the way, they, too, are almost purely digital businesses right up to the point where plates go on a press and ink meets paper.

If I say, "I run digital businesses for my company," that should thus mean, "I run my company." And that's not true.

Despite plenty of conversation and posturing, we're a long way from regulations or even standards for a "Do Not Track" registry as pushed by the Federal Trade Commission.

If "Do Not Track" were to come about, would that be the end of many of the ad targeting forms we have seen evolve on the web, in email marketing and elsewhere on the Internet?

I doubt it.

Geographic targeting gets better with each new consumer conversion from proxied dial-up accounts to broadband. If you visit a site using home DSL, cable or fiber access, or use the mobile web via a 3G or 4G connection, chances are the broadband Internet provider sends along a host name that at least reveals what town you're in, if not what part of town. This targetable -- though not personally identifiable -- bit of information goes to the site even if you use a browser that successfully anonymizes you and your computer.

TVNewsCheck looks into Deseret Media's news production approach and finds a model it implies is novel -- but that, in fact, we in the industry have tried before, though we might have widely spread opinions about that memory.