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.

You are currently number 1 of 1 in the queue.

Thank you for your patience. You are now chatting with 'Lee'

Lee: Welcome to our sales chat. How may I help you?

Jay: I need to cancel my account, and no one seems to be able to do it for me. The site directed me here to sales chat, and I started with another rep. That rep pointed me to a Cancel page that is supposed to initiate a DIFFERENT chat, but the link to initiate that chat is broken. It does nothing. Please help me cancel my account!

Please wait while I transfer the chat to 'Craig H.'.

You are now chatting with 'Craig H.'

Craig H.: Hello, Jay. Welcome to eFax online support. I am Craig H., your online Live Support Representative. How may I assist you?

Jay: Your chat system is screwy, for starters. But let me explain: I need to cancel my account, and no one seems to be able to do it for me. The site directed me here to sales chat, and I started with another rep. That rep pointed me to a Cancel page that is supposed to initiate a DIFFERENT chat, but the link to initiate that chat is broken. It does nothing. So I logged back into sales chat and explained all this and that chatter transferred me to you, where I once again have to explain all this. Please help me cancel my account! I simply no longer need it!

Craig H.: I apologize for the inconvenience.

Craig H.: I will be glad to assist you with the cancellation request via this chat session.

Jay: My efax number is xxx-xxx-xxxx

Craig H.: Could you please provide me your registered email address and billing zip code for verification?

Jay: xxx@xxx.xxx, xxxxx

Craig H.: Thank you for providing your information.

Craig H.: Please give me a moment while I pull up your account.

Craig H.: In the meantime, please type the number corresponding to your reason for cancellation:

Craig H.: 1) Moving to another provider

Craig H.: 2) Bought a fax machine

Craig H.: 3) Business or role changed

Craig H.: 4) Short term project completed

Craig H.: 5) Financial reasons

Craig H.: 6) Problems with faxing or billing

Craig H.: 7) Dissatisfied with quality of service

Craig H.: 8) Too costly

Jay: 4

Craig H.: Jay, as we'd like to keep your business, I can offer you a discount and also waive your subscription fee for 2 months.

Craig H.: After the free period, pay just $12.95 per month. This plan includes 130 inbound pages monthly and extra pages are just 15 cents each.

Craig H.: There is no contract and you may cancel anytime. Shall I switch you to this savings plan?

Jay: No thank you. I don't need it anymore

Craig H.: OK, before I close your account, we now have an annual plan that will let you keep your eFax service for just 14 cents a day.

Craig H.: You make one annual payment of just $50 and pay nothing more unless you exceed 30 pages per month. Extra pages are just 15 cents.

Craig H.: This deal won't be available once your account is closed. Can I switch you to this savings plan which lets you keep your fax number for just 14 cents a day?

Jay: I DO NOT NEED THE SERVICE ANYMORE

Craig H.: OK, I will go ahead and cancel your account.

Craig H.: Is there anything else I may assist you with?

Jay: No, just please send me confirmation that the account is canceled.

Craig H.: Sure, an e-mail confirming that your account has been canceled will be sent to your registered e-mail address.

Jay: OK

Craig H.: Thank you for contacting eFax online support. I hope you found our session helpful. Goodbye and take care.

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.

If I say, “I run interactive businesses for my company,” you might reply, “But your [sites|apps|pages] really aren't all that interactive.”

That's the aspirational part.

Being digital just means you use 1s and 0s instead of hand tools, chemicals or mechanical devices. Once you convert to digital technologies in every key element of your business, you check off that box and move on to something else.

Being interactive means growing one-way mass-media communications forms into multidirectional, multithreaded, continuously evolving conversations. Interactivity comes in infinite degrees, so you never get to check off the box that says it's done.

So don't talk to me about your “digital strategies” unless you include things like exciters for digital TV transmission or kerning pairs in Adobe InDesign for digital construction of newspaper pages. If you want to talk about interactive strategy, I'm all ears.

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.

What about interest targeting? Before a site knows to serve you ads based on expressed interests, you have to express those interests to the site. On purpose. That by its nature circumvents “Do Not Track,” much the way businesses can still solicit their current and even former customers by phone even if they are on “Do Not Call” lists.

Behavior targeting — serving you a message based on your recent online behaviors, such as sites visited and search keywords — might seem most vulnerable to a “Do Not Track” system. I think, however, it would find serious trouble only in the unlikely event DNT were to gain near 100 percent adoption.

Otherwise, what would stop developers of ad serving software or ad networks from employing statistical sampling methods? Using sampling on a large enough volume of inventory, shouldn't an ad net be able to extrapolate big-enough behavior segments from the observed behavior of even a small percentage of people who do not opt out using DNT?

I leave it to others to debate the ethical, business or technical implications. I'm only saying “Do Not Track,” for whatever comforts it may provide people who sign up, doesn't seem likely to end any of these major forms of online ad targeting. What am I missing?

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.

Deseret's news organization pumps content into a Salt Lake City newspaper, television station, radio station and affiliated websites. Deseret CEO Clark Gilbert, not long ago from the Clayton Christensen-bred consulting stable, won raves for his keynote presentation, a stark problem exposition, at the recent Borrell Associates conference on mobile strategies for media. He certainly appears willing to shake the company's structure to its core, including its journalistic workflows.

The news approach attempts to separate newsgathering — the inputs — from news preparation and distribution — the outputs. The role most closely related to a traditional reporter's job description now focuses on gathering all the components of a story. The role most closely related to a traditional editor (newspaper) or producer (broadcast) now focuses on processing the components into a story for each use case: print, broadcast, interactive.

Newsroom leaders, in richer days, experimented with this separation of the “hunter-gatherer” from the “packer-distributor” tasks. And one form of news organization lived almost entirely by it in the 1970s and 1980s: news magazines such as Time and Newsweek. But you don't see the characteristic gang-bylines on very many newsmagazine spreads anymore.

I always understood that the news magazines shifted away from this model because of its expense and inefficiency. But I never worked for one so I'm hoping some of my media pals will read this and either confirm or set me straight.

With today's launches of Operation Tune-Up on KPAX.com in Missoula and KAJ18.com in Kalispell, Cordillera Interactive finished its rollout of new site architectures to all seven station.com sites Cordillera runs in Montana.

We will pause and sigh, relieved, before moving on to more site launches the first weeks of October, November and December.

We stepped up our game nicely in Big Sky Country, and that's just for starters. Op Tune-Up sits very early in a long cycle of new product development and enhancements.

Cordillera is not a big company, and we do not operate in top-25 markets — but the work our corporate and local teams do, on projects like Tune-Up and everyday operations, stacks up against anything I've seen in the big towns. Makes my job a lot of fun!

Cordillera Interactive launched two more Montana site rebuilds this week in its Operation Tune-Up project: KTVQ.com in Billings and KXLH.com in Helena. Here's the before (left) and after.

The changes under the hood matter most in this project, as I described last week: lighter page weights and scripts mean faster load times and fewer nagging browser incompatibilities. Visually, we cleaned a lot of things up, but the differences should not be jarring or confusing to an occasional visitor.

We'll finish Montana sites quickly then move on to a series of launches in early October. As always, I welcome comments from my friends in the user experience and Web programming fields.

I have not shared much here about my new role leading Cordillera Interactive. I have wanted to, but had very little time to share stories of our rapid progress on this blog.

This week, we have something