Imaginary Landscape, LLC

It's 30-seconds long. It's blurry. It's a toddler having a great time and dancing to music. The music is garbled, distorted and barely recognizable.

It's a YouTube video at the center of a huge fight. The background music is Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" and Universal Music sent out a letter requesting that the toddler's mom Stephanie Lenz remove the video because it violated copyright.

Lenz, with apparently has a ton of free time on her hands, has made this into a crusade with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She filed suit. Universal Music defended itself. The suit was dismissed. She amended the complaint. Again to the court. A second dismissal motion is currently under consideration.

But for now, the video remains available on YouTube. Take a look - while you can - and see how crazy this fight is.

Stephen Colbert is pretty funny and I enjoy his show for what it is - comedy. So imagine my surprise when I read that - among his overarching claims of self-importance - there is scientific truth to the phenomenon, "The Colbert Bump."

In fact, there is more than one scientific-ish study to indicate the reality of the Bump. Each one has pretty graphs to prove their scientific-ness.

One is from Mozilla. On his show, Steven Colbert made mention of the download frenzy of Firefox 3. Within two minutes of the mention, there it was - in all its graphical glory - the Bump.

Just in case you remain skeptical (aka, liberal), then I shall point you to Political Science Professor James Fowler from the University of California San Diego. Professor Fowler just published the article, "The Colbert Bump in Campaign Donations: More Truthful than Truthy" in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. It too has spiffy graphical evidence of the Bump.

So there it is, Nation. Scientific proof.

Last week our office T1 stopped working. For a Web company, the loss of our connectivity is a body blow.

It turns out that a new tenant is moving into our building, replacing an auto body shop. This new tenant is a microbrewery, so its arrival is quite popular with staff. I know I'll be happy to replace the too-often smell of fiberglass resin and exhaust with whatever odors result from the beer making process. I mention this because within that space is the main phone "nest" that powers the building and our T1.

As part of the tenant transition process, the landlord had to clean up 8+ years of auto body crud, which involved power washing and sand blasting.

The landlord assured us that it would not be a problem - that they would build a box around the nest of exposed phone wires to keep it safe. Which worked, up until the point where our T1 crapped out.

Upon further inspection, the "box" was not well affixed to the wall surrounding the phone nest. In fact, there was a several inch gap just above our T1 line - which I'm sure resulted in a torrent of water, sand and detritus waterfalling through the gap.

Our disaster recovery plan dictates that we send everyone home when office connectivity goes down so they can work remotely, which is what we did after it appeared the outage might last awhile. A skeleton crew remained at the office to answer phones and coordinate repairs.

I was more than a little skeptical about the repair process. Savvis provides our T1 service, over an AT&T line. This requires a two-vendor dance. First the call into Savvis, then their coordination with AT&T. However, it was beautifully choreographed and nothing short of miraculous.

Savvis performed their remote checks, determined it was a problem with the line, ticketed AT&T, who performed their remote checks and determined it was a problem with the line between us and their local network center. AT&T dispatched a truck that checked the line all the way to our boxed nest.

The technician needed a different truck, went back to his facility and returned within an hour. Spent a couple hours working on the line (it turns out that water had seeped in between the wires and the sheath of our T1 line). Replaced the line, tested it and all the while remained helpful and committed to the repair.

We were back up and running within 5 hours. Thank you Savvis and AT&T for stepping up.

I have Comcast at home for cable, connectivity and phone. For the most part, it works just fine. However, when it doesn't, I dread the call.

One time my toddler accidentally pressed a standby button on the front of the modem. Forty-five minutes of "off-shoring" later, they had to dispatch a truck. Luckily, I had a seasoned tech who took one look at the pattern of blinking lights and pressed the standby button again.

He took mercy on me by altering the paperwork so that I would not incur the hefty service charge related to "user error." I asked why the customer service representative couldn't diagnose such a straightforward issue over the phone.

He gave me one of those looks as if to say, "Does that really surprise you?"

I stumbled upon a completely unofficial, irreverent and starkly honest PowerPoint presentation created by a Comcast employee and distributed for internal amusement. If you have Comcast - really any large vendor - then this is worth the couple minute click through.

Enjoy.

I've been experimenting with the contact form on our Web site. It is an important - perhaps the most important - aspect of our Web presence. For all the blogging and news releasing and testimonials and marketing, our primary method of gathering online feedback is the contact form.

We have always had decent traffic to the site and decent visits to our contact form, but a poor submission rate at around 5%.

It's not like the links to the contact form are misleading - for the most part they read "contact us" or "contact center." So if the links are not misleading, why are only 5% submitting?

I took a hard look at the form itself and realized that I was falling into a traditional marketing trap - trying to get way too much information up front. It seems that as marketeers, we are so thrilled when someone decides to pause and fill out a form, that we cram as many questions as possible. If they are looking at the form, they must be interested, right? If they are interested, they certainly will be happy to tell us all sorts of information about themselves - up front, right?

It's like we think this is the only time we will ever have to interact and we must gather all the information possible - right now.

But the marketing and sales process is more of a continuum - and the contact form needs to respect this if it is to be successful. Ask the absolute minimum needed for this exchange and nothing more.

As I was reviewing the form with this new frame of mind, I was able to immediately remove fields that had no place in the context of an initial inquiry. They included the assorted physical address fields, fax, preferred method of contact and "how did you hear about us?"

The results were wonderful. 160% increase in forms, 120% increase in conversion rate. The best part? No reduction in the quality of the form information submitted.

I thought the information was important enough to share, so I wrote it up.

Download the complete study.

It's been a nice ride - the tax free ecommerce thing - but I fear it will come to an end all too soon. I'm surprised it's lasted this long.

Last month New York State passed a law requiring retailers to collect sales tax for any items shipped to New York. The wording of the law is a bit screwy, in that it only requires the tax from retailers that directly or indirectly solicit New York consumers - like placing affiliate links on a site owned by a New York company or resident. Amazon is suing New York claiming the law is unconstitutional. Actually they say it is, "invalid, illegal and unconstitutional." No doubt immoral and fattening as well.

Texas has now joined the me-too wagon and is investigating the possibility that Amazon owes it millions in sales tax dollars.

Today, the City of Chicago is suing eBay and its subsidiary StubHub for not collecting city amusement taxes on online ticket sales for Chicago venues.

Online retailers point to the 7,400 state and local tax codes throughout the US as far too onerous for them to track, collect and pay.

The great irony is that tax free online shopping hasn't saved the consumer that much money. Instead, it has shifted to shipping fees, which has resulted in a windfall for shipping companies.

Regardless, it is coming. I doubt even Amazon can stop salivating lawmakers from such a juicy new tax.

When it was first suggested, I was immediately against it. The thought of outsourcing our company email to anyone, even Google, was simply not acceptable.

However, when asked "Why?" I stumbled and stammered. "Because we are an Internet company and, well, we just have to do our own email?" I trailed off, ending in a weak question as I heard myself.

Then the ever-so patient folks that handle our systems quietly pointed out:

• Gmail supports our domain
• It offers 99.9% uptime guarantee
• It is available through POP, IMAP and Web
• It manages spam beautifully
• It costs $50 per year per person
• Each mailbox comes with 25 GB of storage
• They even have a spiffy way to migrate our existing IMAP accounts

That's a lot of benefit for around $1,000 per year. Depreciation on our mailserver alone equals that, let alone the maintenance of it. I don't even have to go into spam productivity issues to know it is a fiscally sound idea.

Sometimes sacred cows really do make for good hamburgers.