And most of them will be paid by political interests, I suspect. Did you catch the recent mini-scandal involving Democratic bloggers who were on pres. Candidate Howard Dean’s payroll in the U.S.?

The only other bloggers who are currently paid regular salaries — as far as I know — are people like Wonkette, Gawker, and Fleshbot.
Some big-time bloggers do make a living out of Google Ads….

Can you think of other ways the financial model could work?

Whats heartening about this article and the one by Amit is the underlying implication that bloggers today are being seen as credible voices, as expert voices (in some cases), as important voices when compared to the older perception of diarists. Its going to take a lot more than a sprinkling of articles to actually showcase the value that we recognize intuitively today, which perhaps wasnt obvious to us too when we started blogging.

Lets talk some more about BlogWalk … we might even invite a journalist or two for it :):):)

I remember having to explain the details of XML for 45 minutes to a seriously clue-deprived business journalist from Business Today. She had no idea what it was, and kept asking me questions like “what percentage of your web pages are HTML and what percentage are XML?”
(I got one quote for my trouble.)

One useful thing I learnt from my time as a consultant (thanks to this book) was that most reporters already have an angle they’re chasing. If what you say doesn’t fit in at all with that, then you may find your words twisted or omitted to fit. It’s always a good idea to try figuring out the angle and sculpt your answers accordingly.

Although this method does not make me popular with journalists, I find it better to be less quoted than to be misquoted.

To repeat an already made point, it is not just the journalists who don’t get it, a majority of the people who end up using tech from close quarters don’t get it too.

Why in good lord’s name were you trying to explain XML to the journo when even those who are creating the specs can’t do it well enough? Always remember to use watch words and key phrases like “underlying framework” and “application neutral.” They’d be happy and you’d never get misquoted ;)

Yazad: Been a while since the old days at ‘Shekhar Gupta’s personal pamphlet,’ but I will give it a shot.

First up, Indian media, traditional or online, is unbelievably ignorant about technology, the net or anything related to it. Neither the top bosses nor the minions have any clue about what is happening on the net and as a result facts are hard to find in the stories they do, while mistakes are aplenty. Even when that is the case, you can’t really blame a reporter for chasing down an angle with a story; every reporter does that. The shorter version of the story is that the media just does not ‘get it’.

The issue with printing URLs in articles is that there are just no style sheet specifications in most publications on how to use them and it does not help things when the URL break or hang, especially with the amount of ‘kerning magic’ that is used to make the copy fit the given space.

You really can’t hold it against the chap that he did not understand “handwiring”. I still remember the “what the fuck is that?” mail I got from the tech head at Express Online, almost two years back, when I wanted RSS feeds to be rolled out. Now, in a different place and a different time, the story has not changed at all. Technology in media circles is like looking at an unconscious yeti - they are scared, awed and can’t make any sense of it. Believe it or not, what clinches the case in most places is not the cost or the utility, but that who had the nicest Power Point presentation.