It’s well-known ploy of military aircraft and missiles to send out a cloud of metallic chaff when under fire to divert incoming threats.

Are the comment spammers now using a similar tactic? I’ve noticed lately a change of tack by these jolly folk who always congratulate you on a wonderful site while slipping a link under the radar.

A typical Gmail “conversation” will contain a “Please Moderate” message and a link taking you to the moderation panel. This will have caught all those comments with two links or more, depending on how it’s set up. Many of the “comments” will have up to a hundred links, maybe more.

But if you think deleting them is the end of it, think again. This is just the chaff to draw your fire. If you also click on the comments button (in Wordpress), you may well see a whole pile of others from real estate, insurance, viagra, and casino pluggers with just one link back. These are already posted, usually on older posts you never visit. Just delete them individually from the panel.

I have a strong suspicion that the blatant stuff caught by the spam code is chaff which allows the jolly stuff to get through. After all, how many bloggers count their comment emails and match it with the numbers they delete?

Tip: always hit that “comments” button and scrub the junk by hand.

However fast you drive or fly towards it, the horizon never gets any nearer.

Windows Vista is a bit like that. Slated as Longhorn for 2003, it had to be rewritten from the floor up in 2004 and was recently promised for Christmas this year.

In an appalling bit of spin that “buries bad news”, Redmond has proudly announced: “Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006″, but follows that with: “… and broad consumer availability in January 2007″.

A product due for 2003 is now “promised” for 2007. A complete product cycle has been missed. That’s a massive blow for computer manufacturers and retailers who will have to sell XP machines over the holidays just a month or so before Vista becomes “broadly available”.

Mini-Microsoft cries out in shame: “Fire the leadership now.”

Robert Scoble loyally tries to explain the delay while reaching for the Merlot to dim the pain.

Syntagma has a solution for all this uncertainty. Rename Windows Vista, Windows Horizon. Then we’d understand … philosophically, at least.

Syntagma Media is seeking two bloggers who are familiar with various aspects of sailing:

1. Modern sailing with emphasis on boat types, gadgets and transatlantic sailing grounds. Some experience of sailing absolutely essential — Old Salts can tell an armchair sailor at a thousand yards in a peasouper.

2. A blogger qualified to write about Tall Ships and/or historical aspects of sailing development.

Please email me at:

Glancing through the stats for Syntagma Media’s blogs, it’s pretty much apparent that up to 95 percent of visitors are from the USA.

That drops a bit, to nearer 50 percent, on our handful of traditional British sites. Nevertheless, the message is clear and loud, the US rules the Internet and gives us most of our traffic.

To reflect this in the work we do here, we will now adopt American spellings across the network, with the exceptions of the quintessentially-British sites, Royal Anecdotes, Aristocracy Anecdotes and London Stock Exchange Latest.

Yay, even here on Syntagma, the Mother Ship, the “u” will disappear from colo_r and labo_r and other words of their ilk. Travel_ing will have one “l” only — a saving of energy all round, or should that be “ro_nd”.

Our many British fans should take heart. Ancient French spelling will disappear from the language. And why not?

One consolation, on Royal Anecdotes the Queen will not be spelt “Qeen”. That’s far too Chinese for our taste.

After all the fuss about Dave Winer’s promised retreat from blogging, he’s decided to replace the cheerful header on Scripting News with a gloomy one. Sensitively done, Dave. It’s good to see you’ve retained your sense of humour.

There’s been a note of gloom in the blogosphere for a while now, mainly coming from the old tech A-list, which sees itself being usurped by a younger crowd and the commercial set. Robert Scoble and Dave Winer have been blogging 24/7 since the blog stone age. They’re all blogged out.

Neither does it for money per se, just reputation and “celebrity” buzz. How they’ve maintained the energy over all those years beats me. The psychological force behind the comments they get would be enough to blow away an adult male elephant.

Jaded, faded stars are always bitter. Norma Desmond would have a lot to say to Messrs Scoble and Winer.

Tribute To Dave Winer and Robert Scoble:

Memorable Quotes from Sunset Boulevard. (1950)

Joe Gillis: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.
Norma Desmond: I *am* big. It’s the *pictures* that got small.

Norma Desmond: They took the idols and smashed them, the Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos! And who’ve we got now? Some nobodies!

Norma Desmond: We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!

Max Von Mayerling: She was the greatest of them all. You wouldn’t know, you’re too young. In one week she received 17,000 fan letters. Men bribed her hairdresser to get a lock of her hair. There was a maharajah who came all the way from India to beg one of her silk stockings. Later he strangled himself with it!

In line with our policy of developing high-end, mature content on our blogs, Syntagma Media is very happy to announce our 16th: Golden Agers.

The new site is being written by Adelle Tilton and will serve baby boomers and seniors.

The “Greylies” sector, as it’s called in England, has overhauled the youth market in importance and is a prime focus for advertisers.

So here’s to the Golden Greylies and all those baby boomers approaching retirement. You have not been forgotten.

Benjamin Cohen, who writes for the Times (London), has an interesting article in today’s edition on the Drudge effect.

His resource box says he made his first million as an internet entrepreneur by the age of 17, so it’s a little strange that he was caught out by the tsunami of traffic when one of his posts was featured on the Drudge Report.

As his website gradually slowed to a standstill, Cohen received a phone call:

“You’ve been Drudged!” said the northern voice on the other end of the line. It was Antony Johnson, of the entertainment website ContactMusic.com. He explained that Drudgereport.com, the American news website, was linking to our Clinton story. A quick (or, in this case, slow) view of the server’s log files indeed showed an enormous level of traffic coming from the Drudge website. In the space of an hour, we had received more visitors than we usually receive in a week.

Their Slough-based hosting company (unnamed) reported that the traffic had broken one of their computers and it would take two days to order new hardware and replace it. Have they never heard of backup?

Luckily, Cohen had backed up his site to a laptop the moment it started to struggle. He remembered a London company called Serverstream and called them with his problem.

Then to the rescue came Serverstream, a London-based hosting company. I had used them for projects I’d worked on in the past and I still had the phone number for Jonathan Obadia, the managing director, on my mobile phone. He reassured me that they would be able to get a new machine ready for us to use before midnight.

It was actually remarkably simple to make the move. Thankfully, during the few minutes between the site slowing down and going offline, I’d downloaded a backup to my laptop. Theoretically, all I’d need to do would be to upload it on to a new server and then make changes to the name server records.

This is a cautionary tale for all startups and growing businesses on the Web who haven’t quite made the transition from hobbyists to full-blown business model. Cohen ends his piece:

“All in all it was a little lesson in the price of success and a stark reminder our website is no longer a hobby, it’s a real business with employees, offices and shareholders.”

Talk about mergers and acquisitions, the world’s going spring crazy. Here I am blogging away about a projected merger between the London Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, while the New York Stock Exchange is poised to jump in with a counter-bid. Next up, Euronext is plotting a marriage with the German stock exchange. Now, DuncanRiley.com has joined b5 media.

Where will it all end?

In the past two weeks Syntagma Media has been approached on two occasions with offers of mergers and partnership packages.

The first was an indeterminate offer from an Internet company that just wanted to talk a deal through. It wasn’t clear whether it was a direct purchase offer or what other options were on the table.

The second came on Sunday from a media corporation about to unroll an impressive list of niche website properties and business blogs. Syntagma Media would become part of it and yours truly would manage the European side of the business.

Both were potentially good offers, but I turned them down.

Let me lay out the situation we’re in right now. Syntagma Media has a few more leaps to make before we reach stage one in the business plan.

The first is to put on more blogs and bloggers during the first half of 2006, and resolve a few structural issues.

The second is to develop our book publishing arm for launch in the second half of the year. This will make use of new technologies in printing and distribution. Quality on-demand printing is beginning to emerge now and will become mainstream for anything but blockbuster novels by the end of this decade. Electronic publishing is also struggling out of its shell at last, especially for tech and topical subjects. 37signals has just self-published its own PDF ebook and collected a whopping $33,000 on the first day. There’s real value in publishing now if costs can be markedly restrained.

So, Syntagma Media is not in the market for mergers or to be acquired just yet. When I have achieved my personal goals and have a business I’m satisfied with, I’ll consider offers and even a complete sell-off to the right buyer.

Until then, keep talking, I’m always interested in hearing new plans, but don’t be offended if I offer a courteous No in return.

One day it could be a Yes.