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!

Yeah right! But that’s what he implies in his post “Now that I’m unemployed”.

He takes us through his meteoric career in pictures, showing articles written about him as a precocious print magazine publisher of Silicon Alley Reporter.

I must admit I’d not realized his early background was in print, but it explains a lot. Dare I say it, it reveals that experience in professional journalism and media give you a head-start online. If you begin as a blogger, you’ve got a lot of catchup to do.

Later, his skippering of Weblogs Inc. provided the impetus for many a blog network startup, including Syntagma Media. Predictably, not many have survived. Jeremy Wright of b5media calculates that only 12 have made it through their first year.

So, the upshot is, he’s left behind Weblogs Inc. and Blogsmith (blog software) as well as the new Netscape, though his early collaborators, Brian Alvey and Peter Rojas remain in post at AOL. What next?

Everyone’s expecting something spectacular, but will that really be the case? Sometimes a path doesn’t easily present itself, especially when you’re suddenly separated from all the projects you’ve nurtured for some years.

I’m not one to counsel him, of course, but if I were, I’d recommend three months off while allowing the future to bubble up from within himself. Many folk will be making offers. They may not be the right ones.

What’s right will come from himself — he has the experience and a unique knowledge of the industry. He has to trust his own instincts right now and not be pushed into a wrong decision because of his sudden “nakedness”.

With an Irish name like McCabe and a Greek one called Calacanis, he could hardly fail now, could he?

Syntagma Media is proud to announce the launch of our second network magazine, 21st-century Phi.

Designed by upcoming design champ Thord Hedengren, it covers the sciences and future technologies stream in our network of 50 Wordpress websites.

As before with Allusionz, there are still features to go up and a couple of sites to resurrect. We’ll be doing that over the next week or so.

Incidentally, Phi is a letter of the Greek alphabet that’s used by science to describe the mathematical formula behind a spiral form that occurs over and over in nature. The spiral of a conch shell is phi. We don’t choose names at random, you know.

Our third network magazine, LifeTimes — lifestyles and celebrities — is going up in a few days, to judge by the speed Thord gets things done.

If you’re a technology addict who can’t get enough of the stuff, please don’t sigh, just read Phi.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion is writing about the need for bloggers to enlarge their horizons beyond problogging if they are to make any sort of living. Yesterday, we had Duncan Riley saying much the same thing.

Today Robert Scoble, in a comment, is calling bloggers, “amateurs” — a word I’ve used occasionally — and mainstream media journos, “pros”. This is happening all over. The penny seems to have dropped that the confined world of the blogosphere is not Dick Whittington’s London Town, where the streets were paved with gold — in his imagination at least.

Rubel is even predicting a downturn in conventional blog-type advertising and advising bloggers to write original reports for high-end clients instead.

We can take some satisfaction here at Syntagma since we’ve been saying this for quite a while, much to the fury of the blogosphere’s old guard. Our early adoption of Web 4.0 (the Hyperbolic Holographic Semantic Web) has caused a lot of consternation on this earthquake-prone ground. [Wink]

So what are we really to make of this? If the Semantic Web (Web 3.0) is about making better sense of data and content, so that real people can use it, it will be an improvement on the dreary 2.0 stuff. Google has been at work on this for a while now — person-centric IPTV advertising (pitching adverts to a single person’s interests) is one of its major goals.

Here we’ve been talking about “content platforms” in this context too. A network magazine is a simple example of a content platform, as distinguished from a technology platform, like Wordpress, which, although it publishes content, doesn’t manage it in an overall context. “Metapublishing” is what content platforming is all about, and that plays directly into the Semantic Web because it organizes multi-domain content into packages which appeal to the same sort of reader.

Content platforms need quality content because they’re presenting it to an astute choice-driven audience, not to random search engines sniffing for keywords. The new search engines will seek out connections and intelligent comments that have real meaning and value to the reader. Google is beginning to do this with its sidebars of extra choices within a search topic.

Content platforms are publishers’ contributions to the Semantic Web.

On the advertising front, we’ll have to raise our game to give better metrics if we are to draw in the larger, more stable, advertisers that Rubel writes about. Here at Syntagma we’re concentrating on big retail advertising since it’s always there. Even in an economic slump, you’ll find the retailers advertising more not less.

Ad tracking software will have to do better. We’ve been testing out an open source version in recent weeks. Imagine sitting at a piano with the full orchestral score of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in front of you, and trying to play it from scratch. Oh, and you’ve never played a piano before.

So there are problems to overcome. I think, though, the best “bloggers” will become “pros” and the best “blog networks” will develop content platforms that will attract the big mainstreamers.

The tide is turning fast now. Some are having to play catchup already. Others haven’t even started.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls …

That 1938 man Loren Feldman, who had some fun with us a few weeks ago, gets into his time machine again with a vinterview (video interview — or maybe that should be vintage video interview) with Duncan Riley, formerly of b5media.

Duncan is in New York right now fresh from his Julius Caesar moment in Toronto. Et tu, Brute is the unspoken phrase in this interview, and even Loren’s subtle wheedling can’t get him to expand on it.

What interested me was how close Duncan’s own thoughts are to my own (as expressed here many times) and to a select few in the industry. That is, the need to become more mainstream, to bring in a wider range of advertising, and to improve the content platform we work with to attract it.

I can see now why Duncan would clash with what’s beginning to look like the old guard at b5.

And it was the Pretorian guard that did for Caesar too.

Syntagma Media is pleased to announce the launch of its first network magazine : Allusionz, devoted to the Arts and Philosophies.

The portal has been designed by Swedish webmaestro and journalist, Thord Hedengren, who also writes for The Blog Herald.

We still have a number of features to put up on the page, but the essential shape and content is there.

The four-post block to left, will be chosen regularly by an editor (currently yours truly), and there’s a feed from the whole magazine to the right. Graphical links to each section of the magazine — represented by standalone websites — are shown below the posts.

Personally, I’m delighted with Thord’s work on this and the energy and speed with which he accomplished it. His remit was to produce a simple, functional page, to drive traffic to sites, in a pleasing and designer-labelled setting. He’s done that magnificently.

The template will be used for our other two network magazines : 21st-century Phi (Sciences and Future Technologies) and LifeTimes (Lifestyles and Celebrities) which will be live very soon.

So get rid of your illusions, read Allusionz.

Another day another departure. What a dynamic industry we live in.

TechCrunch is breaking the news that Jason Calacanis has resigned from AOL, following the departure of “his mentor”, Jon Miller, former CEO.

Reading Jason’s post this morning about Miller’s exit, it seemed clear he was going too.

Interestingly, that leaves both Netscape and Weblogs Inc back at the ranch. Unless, of course, Jason has done a deal on WIN. See also our post on a recent statement by Miller about a possible sell-off of AOL by Time Warner.

We can only wait and see. In the blog network space it’s been a turbulent 24 hours.

Update: It’s now been confirmed that both Weblogs Inc and Blogsmith — two of Jason Calacanis’s former startups — will remain with AOL, and that Peter Rojas, Chief Editor of Engadget will stay with the Time Warner company. Jason is also leaving behind another brainchild of his, Netscape (in its present form). He must be feeling rather naked this morning.

The news of Duncan Riley’s departure from b5media has been broken on b5’s external blog. No details are given and the post is couched in minimalist terms for such a loss : thanks and all the best.

It’s hard to guess from what we know, but Duncan posted on his perblog yesterday to the effect that he was “shocked by Toronto” (b5’s new base) and had left for New York tight-lipped and promising to write about it when he returned to Western Australia.

Darren Rowse remarked “meeting Jeremy for the first time was surreal”. That’s about as ambiguous as it comes, especially from a practiced writer like Darren.

Martin Neumann at The Blog Herald is puzzled why he left when the company had received VC finance. I’d say that was the moment when they could afford to buy him out. This has probably been going on for a while and when the VCs came in, his 25pc shareholding would have been diluted. He may have been happy to walk with a decent payoff.

At the back of it all, though, my guess is that there’s been a long-running personality clash between CEO Jeremy Wright and Duncan over many aspects of the business.

Clashes sap the strength of any enterprise and maybe it’s for the best in the long run.

On a personal note : I started blogging professionally on Duncan’s Weblog Empire, which became part of b5 at its inception. I left for personal reasons, but mainly because, as a long-term freelance, I found the b5 experience a bit confining. If Duncan feels the same way, I can understand that.

Syntagma wishes Duncan great success in his new career whatever that may be. I’ve a feeling it won’t be long before we know all about it.

Syntagma Media is delighted to announce our newest addition to the network : Startstruck, part of our 21st-century Phi network magazine.

Starstruck is not, as you might think, yet another celebrity website, but deals with the more weighty topic — in every sense — of astronomy.

Have you ever wondered what’s going on “out there”? Believe me, there’s a lot. Did you know about the 350 mile storm currently raging on Saturn, with an “eye” that looks out balefully to the rest of the Solar System?

Do you follow the 11-year cycle of Solar storms and Sunspots that correlate so well with the stockmarkets and the 11-year business cycle?

No? Well, now you can keep up to date with the universe, the galaxy and the Sun’s little local village, by tuning in to Starstruck.

Our authors are the Boston(ish) Bloggers, Clive Allen and Andrea Paulsen who probably have their eyes glued to a telescope at this moment. Let’s hope they don’t get abducted by aliens for giving away too many of their secrets.

Definitely one for the diary and the RSS feed.