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Wow, usually I can sit here in my home office at this hour of the morning - 6am - and watch a beautiful sunrise. Amazing colors of crimson and gold fill the sky and it's just one of the most fantastic shows you will ever see ... but not this morning. Instead there's big storm brewing just to the south of us and instead of crimson and gold there's a lot of dark black out there.

And the weather radar confirms that it's a nasty storm ... and it's headed this way. It looks like I'm going to have a wet trip down to our office in town this morning.

More Internet taxes
Yesterday I talked about what's becoming known as the Amazon Tax ... the law that legislators in New York State want the Governor to sign off on so that they can start collecting sales tax from Amazon every time the company sells a product to someone who lives within the state. Funnily enough I called yesterday's column The Thin Edge of the Wedge because we only need one government somewhere to successfully set up a tax like this and every state and federal government across the planet will want to get in on the act.

A little more research this morning and I can see that the title of yesterday's column was already past it's use-by date even before I started writing the column because it seems that a number of other states in the US are eagerly trying to tax digital downloads. Some, it seems, are setting their sights on iTune downloads while other states are more greedy, they want to tax every type of digital download that a member of the public might have to pay for.

So it looks like there really are going to be some interesting time ahead for people who want to sell things online and if the various legislators are so keen to tax digital downloads as well as the online sale of physical goods how long do you think it will be before they want to start taxing sales made on sites like eBay?

Selling in a virtual world
Have you wandered into Second Life yet and if you have joined have you been looking for ways to market your products over there? I have to admit that I haven't been into second life in a long time and back then plenty of big mainstream businesses were trying their hand at selling in that virtual world ... and virtual worlds too.

Now it seems that many of those big businesses may have had their fingers burned because the traditional methods that they tried haven't seemed to work all that well. In fact a recent report suggested that the only people who are really making money out of marketing in virtual worlds are those who are in-world entrepreneurs with no physical business presence in the real world.

So it would be interesting to see how those who were ... and perhaps still are ... advertising adult sites in the virtual worlds are going with sales. I do know that in Second Life access to anything that might have an adult theme is becoming more restricted but that doesn't necessarily mean that we can't make sales.

And might it be possible to provide some form of adult entertainment that is completely focused on the virtual world that you're in rather than expecting people to leave the world to enjoy what you're trying to sell them?

It would be interesting to go back to Second Life just to see what might be possible. I can see Steve rolling his eyes already ... that's just one more thing to add to our to-do list that seems to be getting longer every day.

Beware of disillusioned entrepreneurs
There's no doubt that times are getting tough and, as I mentioned last week, we could be coming to the end of another IT bubble. There are certainly quite a few Web 2.0 start-ups beginning to fold their tents and disappear over the horizon. Of course, that's a sad time and you have to feel some sympathy for the entrepreneurs who have burned through a wad of cash for no result.

You also have to expect the occasional dummy spit as some of them leave the building but you don't have to always believe what they say during that dummy spit. In fact at times like that it's probably best to be very wary about anything they might say.

Last week saw the demise of Mowser ... a mobile internet service that was founded by a former Yahoo! employee. It seems that 80% of Mowser's traffic was porn related too and the demise of the company was brought on by declining traffic and an inability to raise funding.

In a final statement before turning out the lights Mowser's founder declared that the mobile web was dead but is it really?

Somehow I find that very hard to believe.