Pythagoras’s Theorem has 24 words.
The Lord’s Prayer — 66 words.
Archimedes Principle — 67 words.
The Ten Commandments — 179 words.
The Gettysburg Address — 286 words.
New European Union rules for the sale of cabbages — 26,253 words.

From the Parish Magazine of St. Mary Magdalen, Chulmleigh, Devon, UK.

For our first Saturday treat we have a real corker. It’s Roger Scruton’s piece in today’s Times (London) about the need for conservation in politics. As a life-long Burkean, this article says it all for me :

Caring for one’s country – a naturally green aim for a conservative party

Roger Scruton’s new book, A Political Philosophy, has just been published by Continuum.

Making comparisons of online and offline magazines is difficult we’re told. Apples and oranges, some say. But apples and oranges have more similarity than difference. They are spherical and roughly the same size. They’re classified as fruit, often eaten as dessert, contain vitamins and antioxidants and despised by children.

So let’s try to make some sort of comparison between magazines.

There are two types of online magazine :

* Deep, where a single website is developed into a complex structure holding many types of content and advertising.

* Wide, where distributed sites, usually on separate domains, each cover a single, niche topic area.

The advantages of the latter are said to be better search engine optimization and increased linkage possibilities, plus the sites don’t have to be launched all at once with a full staff in place. They can be built up gradually over time, with multiple cost savings.

The wide variety, like Syntagma, are becoming quite popular now, and are often referred to as “blog networks”, a name that gives a false impression of what they are capable of being.

In terms of comparisons with print magazines, Syntagma has 20 or so sites averaging up to 1000 visitors a day, and another 25 newer ones with much less than that. One thousand a day rolls out to 30,000 a month.

In print terms, 30,000 readers for a monthly magazine would work out around 10,000 copies sold — an average of three people read each copy. Over the top 20 sites, that’s the equivalent of 200,000 copies a month. Add on 50,000 for the other 25 newer sites, and you have a “print sale” of a quarter of a million copies per month, which is very respectable for a popular, upper-mid-ranking print title.

Add to that our growth rate of 300pc+ per year and the comparison becomes intriguing.

Differences? There are a few. Syntagma is given away free, supported only by advertising. But, whereas a free sheet in the print market is rarely taken seriously, a website has to be consciously accessed, so carries more weight.

My point is that our readers are all volunteers. They turn up because they want to, not because we stick it through their doors. The free/paid distinction is therefore meaningless online. We can compare our numbers directly with paid-for, off-the-newsstand magazines.

I’m often asked about the demographic of our readership. The beauty of the “wide” model is that different sites cater for different demographics. For example, we used to have a fairly elderly British audience at Royal Anecdotes until we changed its direction to following the antics of the younger members of the Royal family. Now the site gets flooded with younger traffic from forums following Prince William, Prince Harry and their girlfriends. Amazingly, 80pc of that traffic now comes from the USA.

Comparisons are odious, it’s said, but only to the losing side. It is possible to compare and contrast off- and online publishing enterprises. Interestingly, the newer online press often comes off better in terms of readership. The trends are good in some respects, but are thought to be less so in others.

As more people go online, they will become familiar with sourcing their information needs from the internet. This can only grow the market substantially.

The exponential increase in mobile technology, which on the surface might work against us — why would anyone want to read the Wall Street Journal on their mobile phone? — may actually boost web magazines because they are specifically adapted to the screen. Moreover, in the Far East, the Japanese and Koreans are quite happy to read whole novels on small, iPod-like devices.

In my view, though, nothing will replace the book for sheer convenience : you don’t have to plug it in, replace batteries, or search for a WiFi connection. But magazines are less convenient, increasingly costly, and many are migrating online, if only to bolster the stats of their print versions. This is not a Road to Damascus conversion.

Developing a built-for-purpose, online-only, native magazine industry is a market waiting to happen, if only blog network owners can wake up and smell the burning newsprint.

It’s not so much about technology, but user interface design and old-fashioned publishing skills.

That capable gent Evan Williams, he who built Blogger.com into an organization big enough to interest Google, which now owns it, has made a full confession of the mistakes he made with his newish podcast company, Odeo.

GigaOm reports on his speech to a conference in which he admits that Odeo hasn’t yet settled on a business model — very Web 2.0.

In a much linked-to piece last year, Williams listed 10 points for startup success. Two of them were : Be Narrow, and Be Tiny. He now confesses he lost sight of these injunctions as CEO of Odeo.

Other points of failure include :

“Trying to build too much” – Odeo set out to be a podcasting company with no focus beyond that.

This is fairly typical of the idea that if you build big enough, Yahoo or Rupert Murdoch will come knocking on your door.

“Not building for people like ourselves” – Williams doesn’t podcast himself, and, as a result, the company’s web-based recording tools were too simplistic.

Playing to audiences you don’t understand is asking for trouble.

“Not adjusting fast enough” – The company thought its comprehensive web-based strategy would win out over the competition, primarily Apple, in the long term. “It turns out long term is not soon enough for a startup if you’re trying to get a foothold.”

Never try to take on the big boys, at least at first. Hubris is as much a killer in business as it is in politics.

“Raising too much money too early” – Williams seeded the company with $170,000 of his own money. He then obtained over a million in angel funding, only to be offered $3 million from Charles River Ventures. They took the cash.

Using cash-flow techniques is essential for all startups. Bootstrapping may sound unadventurous but it builds sound finance until you’ve got good sales going.

“Not listening to my gut” When you’ve got a bunch of money and you’ve hired a lot of people and you’re talking to your board and you’re talking to reporters, your gut can get drowned out.

At least he knows where he went wrong. His honesty does him credit and may just redeem the situation.

But what price the Web 2.0 bubble now?

[Health Warning] At the risk of causing serious heart flutters among the febrile souls who have been writing furiously about our “desertion” of the blog network space, I’m going to key-in a few words about Web Network Magazines.

Syntagma is now developing slowly into a slightly different entity, aiming at a slightly different, but still online, readership. Change is not lightning fast because there’s just one owner and two helpers on the office side.

The date set for a first beta version of the magazine is our one-year anniversary, October 21, although you’ll see changes progressively until then.

I don’t know why bloggers are fretting over the dropping of the word “blog”. Many new blog-supporting websites and networks have been doing the same for a few years now. MSN Spaces was conceived without using the word. MySpace doesn’t exactly make a feature of its blog connections, either.

So let’s just get away from that word and start looking at the space inclusively, rather than in an elitist blogospheric context. Heather Green has got an interesting post today over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting. Heather writes :

My relatives use the Internet. They’re I think the perfect example of mass market use of the Internet. They send out email chains and check all the popular traditional news sites. They probably visit blogs, but don’t know the difference between them and the other sites they go to. … blog software probably needs to get simpler and more readily available for them to get that part of it.

But then I thought, do they need to blog? … So even as I am confronted with the growth of these technologies, I still think that they are too techie. People can adapt overtime, but why should they? The software should adapt to them.

Here we have the crux of it : a vast army of internet users who don’t know what a blog is, or why it should even exist. Yet, they are customers who shop on the internet, and google up information for a variety of needs.

If you label your product a “blog” network, most new arrivals on your site won’t know what you’re talking about. Ergo, best give them a description they can readily understand.

So why not “magazine”?