In a recent comment here, Jeremy Wright of b5media claimed I’ve been saying nothing but “content is King”.

So let me expand on that, and excuse me for going over old Web n.0 ground again. “Content is King” is early Web and real world. Web 2.0, has been largely about flashy presentation and so-called community values, more properly interpreted as “collective”, or socialist, ideology.

Web 3.0 will leave the leftist politics behind and loudly proclaim : “Metacontent is Emperor”. The Semantic Web will be about making new connections between content to make it more usable by “the next five billion” users, who will be the folk who visit retail sites, like Amazon, to buy stuff, and occasionally use Google to search for a product, service, or answer to an exam question.

By metacontent I don’t mean machine-aggregated snippets related to traffic, or dud “voting” extravaganzas. I mean areas where choice and editorial control make human sense of the mass of data coming at us every second.

“Portals” are the buzz word now in online publishing. Portals are metacontent aiming to simplify our choices of what to read and what to do. Almost every blog network is developing portals nowadays. By Jove we’ve even done it ourselves, although we call them network magazines.

That’s so their purpose is understandable to every single individual who lands on them. Everybody knows what a magazine is, but some may be confused by “portal”. It also tells the visitor something : there’s a human interface here — an editor — and the content will be of the level you would expect in a good paper mag.

Metacontent forms a content platform, above the actual content it serves, to give it more meaning and provide more pathways through it, the very aims of the Semantic Web. So Jeremy was being ingenuous in ignoring the layered effect. Of course, we haven’t finished with the magazine format. There’s a long way to go before the ultimate vision is realized — Web 4.0, perhaps?

Recently, over at Bloggertalks, I wrote about Digital Maoism, the aspired-for Will of the Collective, sometimes rose-tinted as the Wisdom of the Crowd. You’re welcome to substitute “mob” if you’d prefer. This is the aim of Web 2.0 as expressed by Tim O’Reilly — the collective intelligence of mankind is, I believe, the ultimate goal. The history of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao tells us all we need to know about that.

C.G. Jung, who lived through it all from his base in Switzerland, wrote “the individual is the sole carrier of life”. He meant, of course, as observed from a human perspective. Once you let that principle slip, by unleashing the dogs of collective intelligence, you set free every ghastly, super-energized ego on the planet who has the personal objective of total domination and control. Bill Thompson has a great piece in The Register just now, seen from the point of view of a developer.

Now I’m not saying that network magazines are going to solve all these problems, but they are a small pointer to the re-emergence of individual excellence and people-guidance in small distributed parts of the internet. It’s a principle I call Superdemocracy : decisionmaking at the point of maximum competence, which is almost always below the level where decisions are taken now.

The crucial words here are “excellence” and “competence”, not a vague vox pop in which you only have to have two legs and some sort of head to feature on prime-time. In England, we call that “Buggins’s turn” — the idea that all shall have prizes and no-one shall fail, no matter how useless they are. Tony Blair’s Britain is built on that nonsense, and just look at it.

So content is not just King, it also has to be shaped and arranged by people who know what they’re doing and can be held personally accountable for it. In other words, what used to be called “civilization”.

That means editors are not dead, and publishing skills will prevail on the internet over the wayward tidal flows of aggregated popular opinion.

Metacontent is Emperor and Empress.

Matt Craven has just announced in The Blog Herald that BlogMedia Inc is rebadging itself, Problogging Inc and effectively selling off its blog network brick by brick. It’s unclear right now whether they mean to sell The Blog Herald, Blog Network Watch and Blog Network List as well.

On their other site, Problogging.com, Matt writes in more detail :

“As many of you have noted over the past few weeks, we’ve slowly been divesting ourselves of much of our blog network. This is part of a deliberate strategy to move beyond the “wide & deep” network strategy that we have employed in the past in order to refocus our efforts on our consulting business and expand more into services for professional bloggers, including directly consulting in that arena.”

As I’ve written here many times, I believe the blog network concept was over-egged because Weblogs Inc was seen as a network rather than two superstar tech websites. The charge out of this space is becoming more like a stampede. As I write, Steve Rubel is asking whether Weblogs Inc itself will survive within AOL now that Jason Calacanis has left.

From Syntagma Media’s point of view, we have not been a blog network for quite a while, converting to a publisher of Network Magazines some months ago. We look forward to a buoyant future.

Name me an entrepreneur who bought out the venture capitalists backing his nascent company because they were (allegedly) interfering too much and holding his business back?

Evan Williams did just that with his ailing podcast company, Odeo, now renamed Obvious. It was a counter-intuitive move that has nevertheless made him something of a hero among the indie startup crowd who want to stay in control of their businesses.

He says : “It’s about building Web properties that are interesting and worthwhile and potentially make money but are not runaway YouTube-like successes or considered a failure.”

It’s that either/or that drives the gambling instinct behind venture capital. The excitement of picking a winner, the shrug when a loser goes down. Who cares? It’s other people’s money anyway. And the next YouTube will cancel out all the losses in any case.

But there are those who don’t want to be packaged neatly for sale or an IPO. They just want to run their businesses. Evan Williams is one of those and put his own money where his mouth is.

Mark Pincus, whose company, Tribe, hasn’t prospered despite $9.5 million in venture money, said of Williams : “He comes off like a folk hero to other entrepreneurs. We need a model that allows for more experimentation and play.”

The New York Times comments : “The relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs has always been somewhat contentious. When things go well — think Netscape, eBay, Google — everyone gets rich and ends up happy. But often, entrepreneurs struggle with venture capitalists for control of their companies, grow tired of their demands and complain that their businesses get hijacked by financiers dead set on hitting a home run.”

Bootstrapping a business is the traditional answer, though not in fields that are capital-intensive. These days, because of the plummeting costs of hardware, software and bandwidth, it is possible to build a substantial internet company using careful cash-flow techniques and funded by expertise and hard work rather than VC money. A credit card is vital in the beginning, but if you’re good at what you do and you have a sustainable vision, even that source of funding will fall away.

Evan Williams injected $2 million of his own money to buy back Odeo. It was cash he had from selling Pyra Labs — creator of Blogger.com — to mighty Google. Now he wants to have fun and be creative. Not everyone is in that position, of course. But he did it the hard way, and he’s being upfront about his mistakes and his vision of the future.

Syntagma Media was built in that way, largely because it started as a hobby or sideline, and as the future subject of a book on bootstrapping. Experimental though it was, it’s now taken on a life of its own and captured mine in the process. In the end, it’s the vision that counts and, broadly, it’s stayed on course and made some money. Even the book remains, moving steadily along the pipeline.

The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Magazine Publisher, is to be published by Dial Publishing next year.

After the successful launch of all three of our network magazines, I’ve now had some time to assess their functions and advantages better.

Today, I’ve been able to go around the Syntagma Media network of 50 sites, selecting pieces to be showcased in the mags. What immediately struck me was the fantastic range and depth of interests the network covers. Even I was impressed, and I put it all together in the first place.

My point is that the three mags throw a sharp focus on the sites and their content in a way that a sprawling array of 50 domains can never do. Judging by the remarkable stats we’ve had for Allusionz and Phi, many visitors think so too.

Another advantage is that they give a big boost to less trafficked sites, which of necessity all large networks have. In a magazine portal presentation, your least visited site can be seen sitting alongside your most visited, benefiting in the process. Each magazine, although wide-ranging in terms of topics, attracts a similar kind of reader, and connections will be made and traffic driven that wouldn’t happen otherwise. It really does work.

So, what is a “network magazine” and how does it differ from other magazines online? Here’s my definition :

A network magazine is a content platform that brings together a range of websites on multi-domains from the same network, and which are of interest to a similar readership.

They also aspire to adopt print media values and quality, mainly through using experts in their field with a track record of writing offline. No publication can survive with a bunch of duffers.

I’ve no doubt there are many other subtle advantages with the format that I’m not seeing just yet. The only disadvantage is that it adds more work to an already crowded day.

But, to paraphrase the ads : I do it because they’re worth it.

The three Syntagma Network Magazines are :

Allusionz (Arts and Philosophies)
21st-century Phi (Sciences and Future Technologies)
LifeTimes (Lifestyles and Celebrities)

Syntagma Media is in lunar orbit at launching the third (and final) network magazine in the current series.

LifeTimes packages all of our Lifestyles and Celebrities sites under one roof, with an editor’s pick of posts and a rolling feed from around the mag.

As ever, it’s been designed by Swedish superstar, Thord Hedengren, who has woven his usual miracles of speed and panache.

We’ve introduced another feature in the form of an Editorial box to bring you the latest news from the network magazine world. At present, of course, that just means Syntagma.

Don’t think we’re lonely up here. We enjoy being in lunar orbit.

Can’t think of anything that rhymes, so just curl up with LifeTimes.

Damn, that doesn’t scan!