Like everything else in life, especially in the commercial sphere, blog networks need a focus, a sharp brand, a hook to hang your hat on.

Evan Williams (founder of Blogger.com) recognized that when he reconsidered his podcasting company, Odeo. His mea culpa at The Future of Web Apps conference was brilliant and should be read by all blog network owners, especially journalists following the space.

After buying out his shareholders in Odeo, he writes today that his mistakes were : “not focusing the product, building for other people, raising too much money too soon, etc.”

Blog networks are just the same. If you have a sprawling inventory of 50 or 200 websites, they have to hang together in some recognizable way, both by branding and connectivity. “Channels” are not enough. It’s an engineering term, not a publishing one, and doesn’t resonate with the wider audience.

Evan Williams’s new business philosophy is very similar to the one we started with here at Syntagma. He puts it this way :

* Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized.

* Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they’re focused and easy to understand).

Focusing and branding are the key issues here, as is separating the operator from the product. Astonishingly, some Web businesses make no distinction between them. If a new reader alights on your main page and says, “what is it?”, you’re in trouble.

At Syntagma, we’ve started that process by arranging our inventory into three Network Magazines : Allusionz (Arts and Philosophy), LifeTimes (Lifestyles and Celebrities) and 21st-century Phi (Sciences and Future Technologies).

Magazines (French for “shops/stores”) are understood by everyone and immediately break down that public barrier to “blog networks”. You can see how they pan out in the sidebar.

The next step is to add the connectivity and the public face of the magazines, while further developing and adding to the websites already in place.

Syntagma Media is pleased to announce the newest addition to our list, Arts and Mind, a site destined for our 21st-century Phi magazine.

Our author is Robyn McMaster of the Mital Brain-based Center in New York who takes a particular interest in how the mind is improved by artistic activity of all kinds. Here’s Robyn’s own description of Arts and Mind.

Have you ever thought of art as a process that shapes your mind? It could be as simple as doodling at times to capture ideas. Or, it could be as complex as writing a new chapter for a book, with Count Basie’s smooth jazz in the background. Art with the brain in mind, might be as playful as putting your own words to a tune you enjoy. Or, it could be as serious as capturing a metaphor for a poem delivered at a friend’s funeral. In this series, you’ll step into the complex parts and the playful parts of your mind to experience delightful nuances from the arts. We’ll dabble at times in creation, and at other times we’ll simply draw enjoyment from the greats.

Sounds like great fun.

After a year or two as a dedicated denizen of the blogosphere, it’s easy to forget how baffling it all was in the beginning.

Cast your mind back to those first tentative steps into the magical realm of Blogspot, where everything was inexplicably free and you could do almost anything you liked. Er, except that you couldn’t, because you didn’t know how to.

Remember the questions? How do you get pictures in posts? How do people get things into the sidebar and space them out neatly? What in tarnation is RSS? Why do I need a “feed” when I’ve just had lunch?

It all seemed so hopeless then.

Of course, those of us who stuck with it, absorbed all this stuff by a mysterious process of osmosis and trial and error. Amazingly, there were no books to refer to in those days, just totally inadequate FAQs and incomprehensible “explanations” written by geeky engineers.

So try to imagine your average bod arriving at a typical Web 2.0 bloggy website calling itself a “social network”. The culture shock and sense of alienation must be absolute. Even I reel at the thought of the learning curves needed to access sites like Lulu and De.licio.us (does anyone realize that’s a complete URL?).

So I was delighted to come across a post by Stephen Baker over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting, called Web 3.0. It’s all about cracking open Web 2.0, he opines, under three points. Here’s one of them :

Only a fraction of humanity has anything to do with Web 2.0. Others stay to the sidelines because they find the technology too confusing or expensive, or they don’t see the relevance. Bring another billion or so people into Web 2.0, and Metcalfe’s Law alone will make it a radically different phenomenon.

Those of us who are already working on taming the wilder outreaches of Web 2.0 by, for example, converting blog networks into various Network Magazines (you knew I’d get to it in the end), are, by Baker’s definition, working in Web 3.0.

How old bowler Web 2.0 now seems.

All this is by way of introducing our third Network Magazine, now in the planning stages, 21st-century Phi, which will cover science and technologies, including modern ones like ecology and parapsychology.

All so very Web 3.1.

An article in yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph is headed, “AOL chief says Time Warner demerger ‘becomes interesting’ “. Note this is the AOL chief, Jonathan Miller, speaking, not Time Warner’s, who has already dropped AOL from its corporate branding.

In a further deconstruction of the dotcom era merger, the UK part of AOL has been sold to a precocious startup called The Carphone Warehouse for £370 million ($692m), and the French and German businesses have gone the same way.

For those of us in the Bl*g Network space, the big question is what now happens to Weblogs Inc, Jason Calacanis’s blogging business bought up last year by AOL on the expectation of moving from ISP to content business — which was also the intention of the tieup with Time Warner?

Miller believes AOL will be swallowed up before the ink is dry on the demerger papers. By whom, and why, we may well ask.

One thing’s for sure, being a content company bought by a mainstream giant in these uncertain times may not be the bed of roses it first seems.

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.