Harsh asked in an email, “Is Indian IT industry’s business model in danger?”

While it maybe a somewhat rhetorical statement, all business models are in danger at any given point of time because there is always some company trying to figure out how to destroy a company’s or industry’s business model.

Having said that, in the near term (1-3 years) Indian IT sector business model is definitely going to be under pressure, because these companies have built their business around serving primarily the G-7 countries (there are some early signs of recovery but not strong enough to generate a lot of new business). In the long term, though, these companies are fairly well positioned because outsourcing is not going away (it outsourcing is going to become like manufacturing outsourcing to China); it might just face cost pressures.

I am one of those people that makes a living blogging but do not have a Twitter account and have often wondered if I was missing out on something powerful. I am glad to read that just 0.83% of page views for bloggers with Twitter accounts are from Twitter referrals.

My wife and I together draw more than 2 million visitors a month and none of us use Twitter or Facebook (use only to stay in touch with friends and family) or any advertising, relying almost exclusively on search engines and other websites to drive traffic. My recommendation to bloggers will be invest the time they put in Twitter into something else to drive traffic unless they really enjoy tweeting.

Absolutely not!

If you are essentially looking for news (defined as unbiased report on the facts), I turn to NPR or BBC (they are not perfect, but they come close to it). I also read The New York Times and the paper does a good job of separating news from opinion articles.

In a democracy like ours, it is important that we can have access to both news and opinions. The important point is that news and opinions should be described that way and that is where Fox News completely fails. I don’t know why they want to be called a news organization when they would do just fine branding themselves as an opinion channel, or even better, a TV channel to help the GOP. There is nothing illegal or ethical about that and it might actually change nothing for them. People who watch Fox News do it because of the entertainment that they provide in form of opinions with a Republican slant to everything. They are unlikely to change the channels. And regardless of how desperately they want to be called a news organization, most of us who want the news know not to tune in to Fox.

President Obama is absolutely right to respect their right to provide entertainment through opinions, and accordingly, say so.

As someone who takes several overseas trips each year, one of the biggest frustrations is the hassle of going through immigration and customs at home. Today I have joined this very clever program and based on the comments on the Web, I am looking forward to the experience of coming home next time. Apparently, everyone who has used it is in love with it and that is what motivated me to join as well.

For just $100 for five years, you get to use a kiosk (it is a sophisticated ATM like machine with capability to check fingerprints in real time) and clear the entry into the US within minutes. You signup online and depending on the backlog, expect to get a conditional approval within days (4 for me). Then just go to the nearest airport for fingerprinting and document check (whole process took 2 minutes for me at Boston Logan Airport).

A lot of Americans are wondering if they should get the H1N1 vaccine and Lorena and I are also struggling with the decision.

Let me share a little story. Every time I go to Midas or one of those oil change places, the technicians, instead of just giving me a basic oil change, suggest replacing all kinds of filters and using some exotic liquids that they have. It happens every single time and over time I came to realize that they were just trying to sell me stuff and it didn’t matter whether I needed those.

The sad outcome is that if next time they find a really bad air filter that could help my car run better, I wouldn’t trust them. And that would hurt me.

That is exactly what has happened to the reputation of doctors, FDA, CDC, and the pharma companies. You never know if they genuinely mean what they say or a profit motive or efforts by lobbyists it guiding the recommendation.

As someone who is in perfect health and takes no medicines of any kind (thanks to healthy diet and exercise), I wonder if I should get the swine flu vaccine — the credibility of all those making the recommendation is so low. By the way, I am no government-, western medicine-, vaccine-hating zealot.

I have said before that online shoppers should be allowed to buy on a website without being forced to register. What ecommerce websites have to recognize that if they are so awesome that people would want to buy from them again and again, they will beg to be registered, and if they don’t like you, it does not matter even if they were registered by force. They won’t come back.

This morning while researching to buy a TomTom One GPS Navigation System for my car, I found that Walmart (a company that I do admire) had a great price, but they wouldn’t sell it to me unless I registered and agreed to all kinds of spamming conditions. I looked around and found that Amazon had a matching price, and to my pleasant surprise, the shipping was free. For reasons mentioned above, I do have an account with Amazon since I shop there all the time. Walmart, not only did you lose my business today, it is very unlikely that I will shop there again ever until they sell it to me without forcing me to create an account.

In the current recession, I have not seen many interesting ads (the focus on cost cutting has sapped creativity out of the process, it seems) but two ads caught my attention. I have really enjoyed watching Catherine Zeta Jones knocking on doors for a mobile makeover (who would say no if she came knocking) for TMobile and this really clever ad that has everyone talking about Air New Zealand. In case you can’t notice, the attractive flight attendants and other crew members are wearing nothing but body paint.

Since Mark Penn wrote in WSJ that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters,” there has been a lot of commentary on the web related to whether someone can actually make a decent living in America by merely blogging. Here are some of my comments:

Lorena and I do make a respectable living blogging. We belong to that small group of bloggers that have made it so big that we can type away from the comfort of our home and see the payments roll in each month.

Blogging for dollars, or as we like to call it, nanopublishing, is like any other business. It requires a business model and all the business processes that one would need to run a hot dog stand or semiconductor company or bank.

Unless you really do something outrageous or crazy or are a celebrity or have something very unique to share, blogging is a difficult niche to break into. Lorena and I started publishing on the web in 1999. First movers have a huge advantage and newcomers are struggling simply because they started so late.

There are very poor statistics out there on blogging and both Technorati and all the other sources that Penn cited are so wrong (though, they give you a flavor). To give you an idea about the traffic needed by us and the revenue potential (including ups and downs since 1999), for every $50,000 in revenue we need at least one million monthly visitors. After trying many advertising models, we work almost exclusively now with Google Adsense.

For obvious reasons, I am not going to disclose how to succeed like us at blogging, but unless you are very talented at something, I wouldn’t suggest that you even try your hand at making a living from blogging. It is a very competitive market and only getting tougher as more and more content goes online.

I have written extensively about key account management strategy. As anyone can appreciate, it is a highly complex and time-consuming initiative for an enterprise of any size, so when a reader asked me how to get started, this was my short response highlighting five simple steps that one can take:

Organize a meeting with people in your company that often meet with the customers the most, for example, sales, marketing, and support.

Develop a summary of what they think their key customers need the most.

Now take this information to the key accounts and refine the list (add or delete based on what they want).

Develop an organization chart that will include a few people that will interact regularly and then have a supervisor to manage these individuals.

Go back to the key accounts 6 months later to see if it is helping them. If not, make improvements.

I am generally very proud of us being a truly unique nation but as this chart shows I am not very proud of our healthcare system — it is so broken that I am not even hopeful it can be fixed. The GOP and the healthcare companies are much better off maintaining the status quo because that is how they both profit.