Blue Screen of Duds

To make it sweet and short, i won't be updating this blog again after this post. The geek and business blogging from this site will be continue over to the company blog and I will be resuming my personal blogging on the personal domain, mostly on the lines of what used to be here. I won't be transferring this blog's content to either of the two, but content on this domain won't be updated after this.

Sometime later today I will do a 301 redirect on the RSS feed here to pick up the blog feed there. If you want to, you can manually add it by subscribing to it directly. Even if you don't, the transition should be seamless for most of the well-behaved RSS readers.

p.s: There is a bit of an issue with the blog feed not outputting full text feeds. I am working on it. Sorry about that. Fixed

There is sheer and absolute panic in the media markets these days. We have industry veterans advocating a switch in online content distribution from the free model to the subscription model like it is a panacea for all ailments and everyone is rushing about trying to increase rack rates. To all this hectic activity, there is only thing I can say: stop, take a deep breath and try and think long term than short term.

It is rather ironic to see all this activity at this very stage. For years the media has sat on its haunches while the internet and other factors steadily changed the way information is created, distributed and consumed in the world. Now, after the horse has bolted (and also taken barn along with it), they think effecting the above-mentioned changes will somehow magically set things right.

Let me break it for everyone, it just won't do much to help things.

I have previously written at length on the matter and I will link to it than repeat myself:

I have been pondering the issue of value and monetization in the publishing business quite a bit of late and stumbled upon this interesting thought. The argument by the service providers against network neutrality is that it is the presence of the network that enables publishers to generate revenue and stay profitable. The more popular a publisher becomes, the more it stands to gain from a network with neutral carriage policies, thus leading the contention that the carriers themselves should be compensated in line accordingly.

Let us assume for the moment that the argument is true. If you were to turn the argument around, it would also be true that the reason for users to be a customer of the service provider is the existence of the publisher that incentivizes her/him to use the ISP. Looking at it that way, the only party who gets to monetarily benefit directly from this usage is the service provider and not the content publisher. In fact, in looking for streams of revenue that are indirect, the content publisher actually helps the publisher earn more by enabling an eco-system of advertising networks and other ancillary services.

Mind you, the user is already paying the service provider for capacity using either metered or unmetered plans and with the hard limits now being put in place by the providers even on unmetered lines, we can safely assume that their average revenue per user is considerably higher than what a content publisher gets.

Which leads me to the question: Why can't service providers do a revenue share with the content publishers at least for exclusive content? Once you get over the shock, and look around, it is easy to see that it is a model that is already in place at the telephony segment and that is one place where there has been decent growth and money even through the downturn. I think the idea is worth taking a look at, though, realistically, I don't think it will ever go anywhere.

One of the features that I desperately miss form my Outlook-user days is the ability for my email client to use custom signatures. I tend to use a lot of pushing and pulling between my email accounts, so there does arise the need often to have my work-related email signature to show up in my personal email, especially when I am using delegation to reply from the personal email to the work email.

Gmail does provide you the ability to attach signatures to all outgoing email, like any self-respecting email provider does. But it does not allow you to either use multiple signatures that you can pick at the time of sending or use HTML in it (without using Signature Tweaks from Labs) in it.

The workaround for this is to not use signatures. Instead, turn on the feature called 'Canned Responses' in Gmail Labs. You can find it in the Gmail Labs settings tab. Once enabled, compose a new message and create your new signature there and save it as a canned response, which you will see as a drop down menu in the same column that has the attachment controls. You can add multiple options using the same process.

Next time you want to pop in an email signature in any of your outgoing email, select one of the options from the canned responses and you are good to go. It is as simple as that!

Now that we are done with the Powerset hype (also the Cuil hype), The New York Times takes it up on itself to find another avenue to generate hype in the search domain. In all honesty, the avenue is not all that new, we have been hearing about even before the Powerset mania had taken over the world, but I thought we were over and done with it. At least that was the case till the NYT decided to bring out the old skeleton.