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.

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.

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!

Facebook's supposed hoard of cash must really be starting to get restless these days. In acquiring an overwhelming ability to do a real-time of Robert Scoble's life, otherwise known as Friendfeed, Facebook has made a major stride into defeating Twitter... um.. no.. Google..um.. well.. I don't know, defeating someone or something? Our extreme analytical perspective has gleaned it that maybe Facebook has figured it out that it is cheaper to get Friendfeed developers on-board than to copy them feature-for-feature in the longer run. Makes sense Zuck, it really does.

After the latest fracas on the tech blogs about Joshua Schahter's indignation about the Twitter-integration at Delicious, I was left wondering about how did the product get to where it is these days. In its early days, the product was widely used, it was the de-facto standard for social bookmarking and it had a growing user base. The future is not all that rosy for the product. It is one of those platforms that has languished since its acquisition by Yahoo!. What is rather interesting is that the site features almost zero Yahoo!

By now it is all over the place that Pirate Bay (or at least the four defendants) has lost its lawsuit with the authorities regarding their enablement of piracy using the website. Neither will this ensure that piracy related to entertainment will come to an end, nor will this ensure that artists will find another way to monetize their efforts beyond what the entertainment industry can offer.

The greatest price that terrorism extracts, and it does that silently, is fear. This is fear is leveraged often by authorities around the world to enforce laws that don't do much more than constrain the freedom of the majority, while presenting only a minor inconvenience for the for tiny minority who cause all the harm.