When I started Syntagma Media one year ago, I thought we would probably still be in business after 12 months, but that there was a 49pc chance we might not be.

It’s now one day after our first birthday and we’re still here — bloodied but not bowed.

When I say bloodied, I mean it. Running a “blog network” is heavy going in terms of admin, maintenance, expansion, blogging, accounts, staying up-to-date, staying on your feet, and generally avoiding being dragged under by the currents that swirl all around you. The blog network business is not quite like Dick Whittington’s London Town — whose streets were supposedly “paved with gold”.

Our modest target for Y1 was to reach 50 sites and break even. We’ve comfortably achieved that and even exceeded it. I also wanted to have some solid ideas of what Y2 would be about, beyond increasing our content and making incremental improvements. More on that later.

The most important aspect of any publishing business, though, is the quality of the writers who build up the inventory and the list day after day. We now have 14 authors on our sites with varying degrees of experience in the blogging arts, but who are all excellent writers.

I’d like to pay tribute to their efforts over the past year. They are our Pioneer Authors to whom we will always have a deep debt of gratitude for sticking with us through the laborious early stages of building a publishing business.

I’d especially like to thank Lizzie Hamilton for toiling over various arcane aspects of this craft, especially the accounts, despite a recent illness. She is truly indispensable.

And Clive Allen, who designs our newer mastheads among other things, and also “tinkers” in the works like the motor racing buff he is. He’s currently writing our Guide for New Authors, which speaks for itself.

Also Adelle Tilton, who is no longer with us, but who provided a lot of forward momentum in the early days. Thanks to her.

They are all great troopers.

I had hoped to have our print publishing arm, Dial Publishing, up and sprinting by now, but somehow Steve Newman’s Humdrumming appeared on the scene and ran with many of our print projects, including Naked Tales: Stories By Writers Who Blog (due out in May), which originated with the Writers’ Blog Alliance, currently undergoing a much-delayed refurbishment.

Y2 and the Future

In any business, Y2 has to have a stronger “personality” than Y1 because it can no longer plead ignorance and inexperience to cover problem areas. More of the same won’t do. It has to have a genuinely innovative feel about it.

Our “big idea” is not just to pile on more and more websites, but to arrange them by broad subject area into groups with similar readership, encouraging traffic to surf between sites and offering solid categories for advertisers. We call these groupings Network Magazines because they perform the same functions as their print equivalents.

It is the beginning of a native, online, distributed, network magazine industry that will in time match and, I believe, exceed the glossy world of paper mainstream mags.

These magazines are subtly different, being distributed across many domains, and providing search engine advantages plus the atomizing effect which only the internet offers. The brand resides with the magazine, the niches with the websites, and the synergies with the topic similarities.

We’re still working on the idea with a number of organizations way outside the blogosphere and intend to launch Allusionz (Arts, Philosophy & Literature), LifeTimes (Lifestyles and Celebrities), and Phi (Science & Technologies), giving us three network magazines as the starting point of our rejoinder to the likes of Conde Nast and Time Inc.

We’ve avoided the venture capital route followed by other networks of the same vintage, like b5media and Sugar Publishing, because we want to be different. In any case, we simply can’t spare the 4-5 months’ work it takes to raise a modest amount that would do little to improve the quality of the product.

Instead we’re looking at creative partnerships for the future, and will take our time rather than rush into a botched liaison with the wrong people. But we are always open to ideas from our fellow network entrepreneurs and never close the portcullis of Syntagma Towers on enterprising suggestions.

Here’s to Y2.