It looks a bit limp compared to today’s other birthday: the Queen’s 80th, but Syntagma is six-months of age, our half-birthday.

One shouldn’t be too effusive on a half-birthday. Only the likes of JRR Tolkien would hang the flags out for such a hobbity event. But there’s more than a touch of the hobbit about Syntagma Media.

We live in a hole in the ground, for instance. It’s called Syntagma Towers, but it has more depth than height. Vertigo is unknown at Syntagma. Earthworms in your pockets are the commonest complaint.

Looking back it’s all been a bit of a Ring-finding ride. Some projects just develop a momentum of their own. Like thoroughbed racehorses, they just keep pulling on the bit. And so it was with Syntagma.

In terms of success stories, Royal Anecdotes again leads the way. At one point, Aristocracy Anecdotes pulled ahead after an astonishing post on Sir Benjamin Slade, an English aristocrat seeking an heir for his stately pile in Somerset, England. The post was picked up by the Today show in the U.S. and scores of local radio stations. For a few days traffic was enormous and my inbox was filled with emails from folk desperate to become the new Sir Slade (sic).

Spiritual Nirvana is another of our humdingers, closely followed by Supernatural.

When Adelle Tilton joined us she took Syntagma down less-familiar paths. Craftmodo, Knitmodo, and Golden Agers, on self-explanatory topics, and Classy Classical on neoclassical music.

Soon she will be editing our new mini-network, Creme de la Femme, which will take us into even less hobbity regions.

We’ve now got our own publishing business, Dial Publishing, to handle print spin-offs from the network, and our Writers Blog Alliance has produced a book, Naked Tales: Stories By Writers Who Blog, to be published by Humdrumming early next year.

Tech Biz Writing is testing a new form of publishing: putting up a complete textbook in blog form, supported only by onsite advertising. It’s a book on Technical and Business Writing and builds into a complete course on the subject. We may well test other examples of this new genre.

We’re constantly on the lookout for other business opportunities compatible with a content-producing media operation, and a few are already in the pipeline, but strictly under wraps.

If that were not enough, we have plans to turn Syntagma (this blog) into a dynamic hub for the network, with much greater synchronization of feeds and a more integrated search facility.

The question that’s often asked is: how many blogs are you aiming for? Not as many as you might think. The plan was for 21 at six-months (we’ve got 22), and 50 at one year. That will probably be the limit for active sites.

In any network, 20 percent of blogs usually earn 80 percent of the income. Maybe half the sites will just tick over. We’ve gradually pruned the under-achievers and brought in new ideas to replace them.

Some blogs will be side-lined but remain up without visibility, adding a few page-views to the total. Others will be updated only once a week. The main concentration will be on the blogs that work. Fifty cracking performers is the objective, and that will take a lot of weeding out, and a lot of blogs launched.

At year-end I hope to have a strong content-producing network with great advertising support, and a range of options for further exploitation of our text and graphic-based content.

Syntagma won’t be the biggest fish in the ocean, but we’ll be the most profitable and have the most spin-offs.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.