We are about to unveil our long-awaited new design for the Syntagma network, following on from the launch of our three network magazine portals late last year.

Thord Hedengren, who designed the portals, is also producing our new network look. The idea is to carry a similarity of design features from portal to site, creating a distinctive Syntagma style. As a network that started out on the Wal-Mart principle of “pile ‘em in ‘n’ stack ‘em high”, this will be a major departure for us.

But then, Petticoat Lane to Bond Street was always our secret trajectory.

We’re getting a draft of the designwork this week, so it shouldn’t be too long before Syntagma joins the fashionistas at the top of the style league.

Watch this spice [sic].

I’ve sometimes thought that Google’s great project of delineating and mapping the entire internet was time-limited and would some day explode in its face.

The fact is, no matter how much they expand their datacenter infrastructure with cheap Dell computers, the number of pages on the net will grow faster — probably exponentially faster. The question now exercising us is : has the process of melt-down begun?

A few days back I wrote about the current PR regrade and described it as “weird”. Many of our Wordpress sites have remained untouched at PR0 despite clocking around 500 backlinks on Google’s own link: operator. Other, very successful sites have lost PR for no apparent reason.

At first I thought we were being penalized for some factor hidden away below the radar. But others are complaining too, including The Blog Herald and some SEO experts.

I won’t repeat the two examples I gave before, but take our three magazine portals. The first launched, Allusionz, has many more backlinks than the second, Phi. Both sites have been ignored. However, the last site launched, LifeTimes, with fewer backlinks, has been given a 4.

I could go on. Frankly a system with this number of anomalies is worse than useless, it’s positively harmful. Content businesses need to plan ahead. If a crucial metric goes haywire it makes it much more difficult. Better that Google admits it’s overwhelmed and either sorts the system out or withdraws the PageRank measure altogether.

So I ask again, has Google botched this regrade, or has the famed algorithm become so overworked it no longer functions logically?

Has Google suffered melt-down at last?

If the Apple iPhone is so bad, why is everyone still talking about it?

To paraphrase one commentator, the grinding of teeth about the grinding of teeth is out of control.

Straight from the horse’s mouth, we’re hearing that b5media is relocating its offices across Toronto. Our information suggests they are going up in the world, leaving their two-man basement for a three-man cave.

Can it really be true that a “major blog network”, funded by venture capital, is operating from a cave? Well, Jeremy says so. It must be true. What humility.

Here at Syntagma, we have obtained the first footage of the entire b5 team of ten hard at work in their new cave :

Isn’t that the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen?

In complete contrast, Syntagma Media has from the beginning worked out of the palatial, Grade 1-listed pile of Syntagma Towers, pictured below :

In case you’re wondering, the figure in the foreground is yours truly, kneeling in thanks for our good fortune. What you don’t see are the hordes of paparazzi gathered beneath the battlements.

And just to quash the latest rumour : no, Kate Middleton doesn’t work for us. She’s just joined the b5ers in their cave.

I’ve just heard that Douglas Harding died last night. Anyone who follows the outer edge of spiritual philosophy — as I do — will know Douglas as The Man With No Head, after a famous book he wrote ages ago.

It’s a strange concept and takes a bit of work to get your head around, so to speak. But a moment’s insight indicates that everyone has a head except us. We appear to look out from one, but we can’t actually see it. We seem to be floating in a void slightly above a headless body.

That was the basis of Douglas’s thesis and teaching method over at headless.org.

Even stranger to tell is that I got this news from Dave Winer’s site, Scripting News. In a million years I would never have guessed that he would be into the extended mind and headlessness. But you can never know with these Californian types. Even the intellectuals have the second sight down there it seems. It could be a whole new career for him when he finally retires from developing Web 2.0 stuff. Let’s hope so. Dave Winer without a head would be a real spectacle.

Our commiserations to all Douglas Harding’s supporters.

I know a lot of people who pay scant attention to Google PageRank (Page as in Larry Page, not as in “a page”). Until now I’ve been broadly satisfied with the system despite the occasional anomaly. Considering the billions of “pages” out there (not you Larry), it’s only natural they foul up a few.

The system began around a decade ago when the aforementioned Larry applied the academic citation system to the Web (see my short piece on the process here). He revolutionized internet metrics and established eventual Google control over it. He must have been as happy as Larry.

So, although we don’t know all the parameters used in their Algorithm, we do know that backlinks (sources not total links) are the main measure of a site’s importance.

Currently, a PR regrade is going on, and it’s amazingly weird. At the last one in September, nearly all our sites more than three months old were set at 5, a respectable score to attract advertising. This time, quite a few are being downgraded to 4 for no apparent reason.

Take our most popular site, Royal Anecdotes, which attracts between 12,000 and 19,000 unique visitors a day. It has a healthy comments section, which has become more like a forum. The site is linked to by lots of other high-volume websites, yet remains at average levels for the network according to Google’s link: operator. It’s currently showing a PR of 4, down from 5, despite fresh daily postings of original material. Inexplicable.

This site, Syntagma, is showing over 1000 backlinks on the dodgy link: operator, but was pinned back to PR4 on six of Google’s datacenters and the toolbar two days ago, off from its previous 5. It’s now recovered to 5, but it should be much more, possibly a 7, certainly a 6.

The same is happening all over the network. Clearly we’re being penalized for something. Could it be the Text Link Ads at the top of the site, in index.php? Could it be something else?

Google’s top man in charge of the index would surely know. So Matt (Matt Cutts), why are you doing this to poor old Syntagma? What have we done to spook you? I know you’re not the “fat lady”, but we’d be grateful for a song.

It has been announced that b5media’s lifestyle channels are joining Glam Media’s retail-oriented blog network as affiliates. The press release begins :

“NEW YORK and TORONTO– January 9, 2006 - Glam Media and b5media Inc. announced a partnership today to bring content from b5media to Glam, the largest fashion and style network on the Web. Select b5media blogs will join the Glam Network of over 250 affiliates …”

Well, it has a familiar ring to it. The push into the retail sector is a sound one and follows Syntagma Media’s efforts in this direction during the second half of 2006.

Here’s the deal : Join The Glam Blog Network.

I recall we had a few similar offers at the time I was writing about it, but decided to remain independent while building our own infrastructure in-house. Affiliate advertising works for some, but is hardly the stuff of mainstream media. Of course, b5’s imperatives are now driven by the needs of venture capital, so will inevitably take a different route.

But joining someone else’s network was never part of our retail plan — joint ventures are a different matter, of course. I wonder that a long press release was deemed appropriate here.

However, we wish Jeremy and Co much success in this field. It’s a tough business, but well worth extending a tentacle or two out of the tech blogosphere.

If you’re interested in practical paths to Enlightenment, you should head over to our Spiritual Nirvana site, where a new series on Zen masters is kicking off with Bankei, a 17th-century master who, in his day, enjoyed the status of a rock star.

We’ll be serializing biographies of the major, early masters by John M Evans — yours truly — over the next few weeks, each in six or so parts. The first three on Bankei are up, so go and take a look.

I was going to say, “Not to be missed”, but then remembered I wrote it, so I’ll make do with “Catch it if you can”.

Start reading here.

Warning : This is totally off-topic and is inspired by yesterday’s news of the rapidly disintegrating state of the British Home Office under Tony Blair’s pitiful administration.

It’s not a rant though. Promise. Just a look at the Panglossian fantasies that drive British policy nowadays : “Everything for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.