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.

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.

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.

As more details and outrage seep out about the plans by the Associated Press into what looks like a slow descent into madness, I think there may just be some method to it. Since I am trying to wrap up thngs before I head for a much-needed vacation, I'll post my comments as points:

This is a post that has been long in the making, but it was Jason Pontin's Manifesto for saving media that finally compelled me to publish it. Jason's manifesto itself deserves a post on its own and we will tackle it later, but, before that we will tackle a common misconception, that media somehow has to be in one of the formats: printed, televised, published on the internet or published on radio.

For many years we have been trying very hard to unlock the potential in India's internet market. Beyond all the hype, the fact is that we have made little headway in realizing that dream. Even with the stellar growth numbers quoted year after year by IAMAI and other industry bodies, most individual internet properties seem to have a lot of trouble in growing, organically, beyond the three million page views in a day line in the sand.