If you own a Web 2.0 mashup with lots of traffic in the age range 13 to 24, stand by for an approach from the super-cash-rich BBC.

The Beeb, which is funded by British licence-fee payers to the tune of £3 billion ($5.6bn) a year, wants to aquire something like MySpace to link up with a more youthful demographic.

A senior BBC source is reported as saying : “These sites are definitely of interest to us. They are growing at a fantastic rate. They allow users to produce their own content and, above all, they are incredibly attractive to younger people, mostly between the ages of 13 and 24, with whom broadcasters have the biggest problems. If you lose them at 12 or 13, getting them back at 25 is not easy.”

BBC Worldwide, an entrepreneurial division of the broadcasting giant with a remit to add funds to the licence fee haul, believes that buying an internet-based social networking site similar to MySpace will allow it to address a younger audience.

The UK Financial Mail suggests the BBC has £350 million ($655m) to spend on commercial acquisitions, a sum sure to open it to criticism that it’s losing sight of its public service remit.

Fad or genuine opportunity, this will be a bonanza for some lucky social network operation.

Syntagma Media is delighted to announce the latest site in our Web Network Magazine, A Literary Life — from the pen of Steve Newman. It will publish short biographies of famous authors and literary personages, all written by Steve himself. A rare treat for us literaphiles.

Steve has started with a six-part examination of the life, myth and work of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Steve Newman is a playwright, director, actor, historian, and freelance writer, who lives and works in Shakespeare’s Stratford. In 1997 Steve, along with two other Stratford playwrights, founded The Bird of Prey Theatre Company, which is dedicated to promoting new work. Since that time BoP has produced fourteen new plays by writers from around the world.

Steve writes regular features for such magazines as Writers’ Forum, Book & Magazine Collector, Family History Monthly, The Dalesman, Citizen Culture, and The Writer.

The New York Times has an interesting article in today’s issue on how print magazine publishers are targeting students by offering digital editions on the web. “There’s no question that younger people are much more oriented toward getting information from the Web than older people,” said James Meigs, the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics, a Hearst publication. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place for magazines in their lives.”

The economic advantages of digital publishing over print is obvious, so where are the purely Web-based competitors of these interlopers from the print world?

Blog networks, which are commercial content providers crystallizing out of the jungle that is the blogosphere, are the prepubescent digital equivalents of the big magazine publishers.

The question is : have they the talent and publishing skills to take on the new breed of magazine publishers muscling in on their patch.

By adopting a magazine format, as Syntagma Web Network Magazine has, they can challenge for this market from the inside looking out, rather than the outside gazing hopefully in.

Right now Syntagma is leading the counter-culture in the blog network space — at least according to Martin Neumann’s eGonzo feature over at The Blog Herald.

First we had Syntagma Media recently wash their hands of the whole blog network label and launch into we’re now a “web network magazine”. That received much coverage here at The Blog Herald. The jury is still out. But from all accounts it’s designed to reach different audiences … to be different. I understand the theory behind it.

It’s interesting that many people are now starting to “get” what we’re doing here. Those who aren’t are usually folk who have vested interests in the word “blog”, either through incorporated business names or website titles.

The common word used to describe the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon, in which many people toil for years without making a single penny piece in return — is “mashup”. You know, if I wanted to invent a term of abuse to heartily condemn Web 2.0 madness, I couldn’t do better than mashup. The irony is that this is the mashed up word Web 2ers use to promote their strange, unprofitable alchemy.

Bottom line time : All this tech gets in the way of “normal” readers who don’t thrill at the mention of OPML outliners. Simplicity is the key to readability, and that doesn’t mean the joys of Netscape, Digg or other Web 2.0 jungles. It means the ease of access of a plain old print magazine : a contents list, a summary under the titles, and the blog equivalent of a page number - a link. In other words, make recognizable pathways through the content without esoteric references to “feeds”, “RSS”, “aggregation”, “social networks” and all the other mashups.

To obtain the loyalty of non-geek readers (who outnumber geeks by a million to one) you have to offer familiarity, and content that’s varied and never dull. All lie within the remit of the common or garden print magazine publisher.

We’re trying to do just that here at Syntagma Web Network Magazine. There’s a fair way to go yet, but you can watch it evolve here.

I wasn’t going to comment on the weird case of Steve Irwin and his almost self-willed death, but this event is so typical of our over-sentimentalized, fawning society that I had to do a small piece over on Celebrity at Work :

“In scenes reminiscent of the passing of Princess Diana, people who never met him are congregating besides walls of flowers, their faces contorted with anguish. John Howard, the normally sensible Prime Minister, has even offered a state funeral. Thankfully, Irwin’s father has declined ‘because he was just an ordinary bloke’.”

This kind of emotional contagion is easily spread by technologies like global television and the blogosphere, which has also been contaminated by this surge of unprovoked grief. The only sane voice seems to be to be Irwin’s father. Australia would do well to consider him as their next Prime Minister.

Read Steve Irwin - Hero or Suicide?.

Syntagma Media is delighted to announce the second site in our AutomotiveSyntagma Stream, Auto-Exotica. It covers all your dreams on four wheels and is authored by Clive Allen, who also writes our Formula 1 Latest website.

Clive blogs : “There are some cars that enter our imaginations forever. They don’t have to be the fastest, the sexiest or the best; very often it is impossible to say what is so attractive about them. It’s just something indefinable that reaches into our psyche and takes root there.

“I have to admit that I’m a sucker for the look of a car. It can be the most unreliable, cantankerous bag of nuts and bolts but, if it looks good, I’ll forgive it. And my definition of good looks can be pretty strange at times so you might find a lot to disagree with as I add posts to this blog. But hey, that’s what it’s all about after all - discussion and debate, an opportunity to speak our dreams out loud.”

Sounds like a must for all you Petrolheads. Is the U.S equivalent, Gasheads?

Syntagma Media is proud to announce the launch of Arunachala Spirit, written from the mystic mountain of India by Meenakshi Mammi, who lives on the spot.

Meenakshi blogs : “I am writing to you from Arunachala, South India. We are located about 150 kms from Chennai (Madras) in the agricultural heartland of Tamil Nadu.

“I would like to welcome you to Arunachala Spirit, a blog which will attempt to convey some part of the magic and mystery of Arunachala, one of the most famous sacred sites in India. This is a place of which ancient legends and reports tell of miraculous happenings where the sick are healed, prophets see visions, deities appear, pilgrims get wishes fulfilled and sages attain spiritual enlightenment.”

Arunachala Spirit

Syntagma Media is delighted to welcome three new talented authors to our 12-strong team of writers. In alphabetical order, they are :

Douglas Green, a Canadian horticulturalist and hobby sailor, who will be writing two new websites for us — “Green Gardening With Douglas Green”, and “Windjammer - Discovering Sailing”.

Meenakshi Mammi, who lives on the mystical mountain of Arunachala in southern India, will be authoring, “Arunachala Spirit”, an account of the life, spiritual practice and seasons of this most holy of Hindu places.

Jane Phillipps, a British expert on horsemanship and eventing — right up there in the news now since the Queen’s granddaughter, Zara Phillips, became World Champion — will tackle “Horses & Events - Jane Phillipps on Horsemanship”.

So, if you travel by sea and horseback, trek in India, and eat a green diet, you’ll find plenty to chew on here at Syntagma.

For those waiting for the new “front page” of Syntagma’s Web Network Magazine, I can tell you it will now materialize on a new Syntagma domain, while this website will revert to being the company blog and my own personal jabberboard.

We were discussing who we would like blogging for us over a nibble and a tipple the other day, and I thought it might make a good post. So here’s my shot at it :

As a Web Network Magazine — as opposed to a “blog network” — we’d obviously be looking for people who gaze outward towards the mainstream, rather than obsessives locked into the echo-system of the unadulterated blogospheric geekhouse. No offence intended to those goodly souls.

One : Back when the Robert Scoble Departure story reverberated around the echo chamber, and even made the BBC, I offered Robert a berth here at Syntagma. He was very kind. He turned it down.

He then tried to poach Jason Calacanis from AOL to his modest startup podcast outfit. He’s obviously as attracted to the impossible as I am.

Jason, meanwhile, was trying to entice Amanda Congdon, who had just left Rocketboom. Lots of people try to entice Amanda Congdon.

Do you sense a circular movement going on here? An image of sharks in the ocean rises unbidden. Anyway, I’d still like to have Robert blogging for Syntagma in our geek section.

Why? Because of his unrepentant energy, which pours out on-the-button posts like a Maxim gun. That kind of “accurate” steam-power is hard to find, even in mainstream media.

Two : Mike Rundle. Mike is part of the 9rules net cluster and has interests which include Web design plus an awesome grasp of metrics and the underlying arts of the internet. He also “gets” what we’re trying to do here at Syntagma, as so many others don’t.

Three : Chris Pearson. A young Web designer who writes like a pro, designs like an angel (The Blog Herald and TLA), and has an eye on the print world, a sure sign of sanity.

Four : Seth Godin. I’ve read many of the critiques against him : narrowly-focused, academic, boringly marketing-centered etc. He has one overwhelming virtue though which flattens the carpers : the ability constantly to surprise and pluck purple cows from the air. Every Web Network Magazine needs a magician. Seth holds the wand for us.

Five : Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek Blogspotting is an old-hand print journalist who can write punchy and interesting blog posts, while simultaneously researching a cover story for BusinessWeek’s print magazine. In his spare time he’ll even toss you off a book about math(s). A great guy to have on the bridge in a squally sou’wester.

I could add more but I think that’s enough for one blog post. Any other ideas?

None of this constitutes an offer of a job. But my ears are always open to ideas from people we admire.