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.

Syntagma Media is one year old today.

However, since I’m in the middle of a course and have a huge hump of work to get through over the weekend, I’m going to leave this post until Monday or Tuesday.

Until then.

I’m on a course from tomorrow till Monday, so won’t be posting here until then, except for a piece on Saturday, which is Syntagma Media’s 1st birthday.

As Google always says, if you’re looking for something to read, try our Top Posts button above, or have a swing around our inventory of sites displayed in the sidebar.

John

Two decidedly weird stories caught my eye this morning, both involving blog networks.

The first comes from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. An almost unknown blog network (to me, at least) called Popsugar has raised VC funding of $5 million, valuing it at around $12–15m : “Blog network Sugar Publishing (the most popular blog in the network is PopSugar) has raised ‘around $5 million’ in a Series A round investment from Sequoia Capital.”

Sequoia Capital is something of a legend in the industry, not a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears kids with more money than sense.

So what is Popsugar? The main site has snippets of news about teeny idols and screen stars of the moment like Scarlett Johanssen, who’s described as the sexiest woman on earth. Great judgement for a dumpy blonde with a nondescript face. But “hip teen women” may like it, of course.

Is it a flyer? You have to respect Michael Moritz of Sequoia but I suspect it may be a case of bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

The second story is that newly fund-injected b5media is helping to send author and guru Shel Israel on an extensive round the world trip as their Ambassador.

His Excellency Ambassador Israel will visit many countries while researching his new book and representing the b5ers along the way. What next for Jeremy and co, an Embassy at the United Nations?

And what will Shel actually do for them? Talk to a few hundred people who may, or may not, visit b5’s rather low-key main site? Will that investment pay off? Our readers will surely judge for themselves.

One word springs out here for both cases : inflatus.

Yes, there is an audience for teen sites, but they usually have to have something more going for them than gossip regurgitation and a line of comment. They do also have a “social networking” site, TeamSugar, but I’ve only looked at the oh-so-typical Web 2y front page. Frankly I’ve seen so many like it, even the colourful, chunky graphics look familiar.

And blog networks don’t need ambassadors. Face to face is unproductive compared with online viral transmission, whatever you’re trying to get across. Unless, of course, the Bill Gates Syndrome has already set in at b5. Can we expect The b5media Foundation to alleviate world poverty, with Bono as their next Ambassador?

Come on, guys, get a sense of proportion here.

This is not a subject I normally think much about, nor write about here. However, three reasons spring up to make an exception this time.

One: it’s Sunday and there’s not much else to write about. The second is that I’ll be plunging into the market for a property in Devon in the New Year. And three, an entry in Jason Calacanis’s blog suggests that market prices are collapsing in Southern California.

Joining up the dots : what happens in America happens in Britain a few months later. And what happens in California soon spreads to the rest of U.S.

Ergo, I could have timed my prospective foray into the market to perfection. And since this is the new Syntagma Towers we’re speaking about, it’s clearly a matter of global significance. We are after all a “Global Media Network” “widely-read Network Magazine” — with two more to follow.

The interesting point here is that the housing markets have been very strong both in the States and the UK for over a decade, and a main driving force in their economies. Currently, the British market, after a short lull, is picking up strongly again.

A crash in California should give us all pause for thought. “When a butterfy flaps its wings in the Amazon, a hurricane follows in Europe.”

Mind you, there must be trillions of butterflies in the Amazon rainforest. I just can’t remember trillions of hurricanes.

The following story is not for the squeamish or anyone shy of opening their mouth in these politically-correct times.

Today’s UK Daily Mail reports : “The inquiry has lasted more than a year and cost a great deal of money… Witness statements have been taken and a 300-page report compiled. And the alleged crime being investigated? A group of councillors are said to have made baa-ing noises during a debate on sheep.”

Er … baa-ing noises?

“Havering District Council is treating the case with the utmost seriousness. The list of suspects has been narrowed down to four and a hearing will be held next month at which they could face suspension for bringing the council into disrepute.”

You know, whenever Americans say to me, “Your Tony Blair is wonderful”, I’ll be tempted to reply, “You don’t have to live here. You can’t even say baa to a sheep.”

I don’t know about you but I’m hardly getting any comment spam these days. It seems to have dropped off to a thin trickle over the last week or so.

Not that I’m complaining. At its peak we were getting around 500 spam comments a day on our top two sites in the network. I would spend an hour and a half every day scouring our scores of sites for these wretched things. In the end I had to bring in first-comment moderation to keep them out.

However, despite the welcome reduction (it won’t last), I’ve seen a correspondingly huge increase in spam emails to my Gmail accounts. If I slip out for an hour or two, there will be 70 or 80 of these little darlings in the spam trap when I return — one or two will have made it through Google’s pretty sharp defences.

The odd thing is that most of them are labelled “Spam” by the sender. I sometimes wonder if it’s not a Monty Python joke.

Clearly these are sent out by machine and, since they’re so similar, by the same machine. Many are in an Oriental language, so are apparently out of reach of Western authorities.

Since China blocks a lot of stuff from the West, why can’t we block this spam too. It can’t be beyond the wit of technological man to nail these blighters.

But worse was to befall. Many of these emails have attachments which probably contain “active content”, presumably viruses. One of them must have got through the virus protection on our main machine because strange things have been happening to it recently. Internet Explorer suddenly started shooting off empty windows at an unstoppable rate, and the machine was constantly active while the principal work slowed right down to a standstill.

We had a rogue dialler on board which the firewall wouldn’t let out, so it kept on dialling. Cryptic messages appeared. “Can’t do that because the other program is busy”. It’s that reference to “the other program” that sends shivers down the spine. Deus ex machina, indeed.

In the end I managed to find all these scraps of code, including a hidden file for constantly reproducing and copying other files, plus the dialler, and one or two other little beauties dreamed up by twisted minds somewhere in a Shanghai squat.

I would recommend that you turn off “hidden” files in folders containing important information so that all files are visible. Check through the folders regularly for odd looking items. As many of these things come in on images, it’s especially important to do this in your pictures folder.

I hope that cheers you up for the weekend ahead. Mind how you go.

Lots of people are contacting me asking about our recent foray into the retail sector, and in particular how negotiations are going with the retail consultancy I mentioned last week. So here’s a roundup answer to some of the points raised.

The consultancy has three partners, two of whom are gung ho for it and the third, dead set against. We’ve reached an amicable hiatus where one of the partners has been giving us advice on retail matters and will receive some shares in the newly-incorporated Syntagma Media, due in the New Year.

The reluctant partner is happy with that and hasn’t totally ruled out changing his mind on a capital injection or share swap sometime in the future. Ongoing is the word that springs up here.

Others have asked me why I’m laying out our business development plans so freely here on this site. The answer is that I’m writing a book on Syntagma Media’s progress and many of the posts on this blog are outlines of chapters to be written out. The long series of posts on the magazine stuff were first drafts of a whole section of the book. Naturally, the juicy bits and killer facts will only appear in the book.

Those who call us out for boring the pants off them — quite often the Melbourne crowd — well, maybe they deserve it.

Finally, others have kindly written and inquired about our plans for redesign and a series of portal pages for each of the magazines. We’ve been talking with one designer who offered to do this in return for shares in the business. I was happy to do that, but I found her portfolio of work a bit restricted and not quite bold enough for a magazine format.

Remember, serious newspapers have to be conservative in design, but magazines must never be dull. Anyone who can square that circle is welcome to approach us.

I’ve been musing about our first two Network Magazine spin-offs from Syntagma and come up with some names.

The proposed name for our Arts, Literature, History and Philosophy publication is : Allusionz.

The proposed name for our Lifestyles and Celebrities publication is LifeTimes.

That will give us three Network Magazines early in our second year of operations.

The categories are quite broad, because the niches will be at website level, but the groupings are designed to attract the same sort of readers, increasing the interactivity between the sites.

They are also targeted at broad advertising categories.

Stay enlisted for further granules of news.