We are at a very interesting stage in the way content is produced and distributed in our lives and two recent developments serve to demonstrate the challenges that are coming our way.

The first is the Apple iPad

The fact that it is not available in the market as yet has not stopped every self-styled pundit from predicting whether your mom (or grandmom) will line up to buy it and change the fate of the world, or if it will bomb.

Publishing content online is 2/4th measurement, 1/4th experimentation and 1/4th instinct. It is sometimes a science, sometimes an art and a lot of other times blind guesswork. After reading the Afaqs story that asked whether print publications in India are getting their story wrong in online, my thoughts went back to the year 2000, when I started out in online media in India.

2009 was the first time in so many years that I desperately wanted to change my mobile service provider. It started with the problems I was having with Airtel once my phone connection was changed from corporate billing to personal billing. This number has been with me, in my name, for close to 8-years now and it was a bit crazy to know that every time the billing changes, they register you into a new customer ID, forcing you to start fresh from credit limits and whatnot. This just fails on so many levels on rewarding customer loyalty.

This is part of a series of posts on some of the products I have used and come to love/hate through the year.

Abinash Tripathy lays it out, in pretty good detail, the litany of things that are wrong with the great Indian media companies in how they are going to blow it with the opportunities in the online domain. I have added my two bits in the comments there and I have written quite a bit on the subject here and elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus that is already cooking up a hit record there now.

It is not uncommon in the world of blogs and micro-blogging to bash media professionals for their lack of involvement in those spheres or the way they choose to get involved in them. I have been lucky enough in my professional life to see both sides of the divide (as a blogger, Twitter-user and as someone who worked for close to a decade in digital media) and I believe that sometimes the problem really is that there is no simple, easy-to-understand explanation of how things work out there. So, this is an attempt at that.

The full page advertising blitzkrieg launched by Yahoo! India on Monday was wrong on so many different levels that I am tempted to strike out everything that I had previously said about the company here. Then again, Yahoo! India has been a different beast from its parent division, lacking in consistency, direction and focus, with the only common thread being the manner in which both have wasted away the tremendous head start they have previously had in the space.

One of the toughest things to accomplish as a largely one-man-show is to get things done on time. There are too many distractions, way too many things to chase after and a majority of the times things just don't go according to plan. Couple all that with a month-long vacation which shreds apart any bit of work discipline you've had before, the result is a list of things-to-do that pile up and task bankruptcy looms large on the horizon.

So, Yahoo! is now looking to sell off even Zimbra, the white-label email company that it acquired in 2007, in what seems to be a crazy effort to get rid of a lot potentially valuable divisions within the company. It seems to be the case that Carol Bartz has gone off her rocker, or that she is not going to stop until, one way or the other, Yahoo!

One of the rather interesting outcomes of having been largely out of the loop for close to a month is that it helps you differentiate better the stuff that determines what wheat is and what chaff is. Unfortunately, in the digital domain in India, there is much more of chaff than wheat. I will dig deeper into the numbers when I have a bit more of time to spare, but for the time being this will be posted mostly as a rant.