If you read my piece yesterday : Twenty Million Bucks to Build a Digital Network, you’ll be aware that Jason Calacanis has sharply critiqued the “b5media model”, which is a wide, distributed, multi-domain network of “blogs”, divided into 14 channels by niche overlapping.

Jason commented : “b5 media has great people, and I don’t mean to pick on them, but it’s the wrong model. I know this because I tried it back in the early days of WIN.”

Jeremy Wright countered with an excellent, and lengthy, review of b5’s philosophy and business strategy. Essentially, he says : “… the truth is that both Nick [Denton] and Jason came at this as a publishing play. Which is fine. That’s their background. It’s how they do things. It’s worked in the past, and it worked this time around. … When we started b5media, we didn’t do it as a publishing play. We did it as a community play.”

At the risk of sounding like a Calacanis groupie, I’ve got to go with Jason on this one.

A while back I critiqued b5 for lacking publishing skills, basing itself purely on geekery, and lacking proper branding. “What is a b5media, Mommy?”

Believe it or not, I did this as constructive criticism, not oneupmanship, as I’m sure Jason did yesterday. It’s very easy to get tunnel vision when you put so much of yourself into a project that you couldn’t bear to retreat and start again from a System Restore point. At Syntagma, we’ve done that a few times already.

However, I’d like to take up Jeremy’s distinction beween a “publishing play” and a “community play”. What does it mean?

We’re all online publishers, so the distinction falls at the first hurdle, except that if you ignore the publishing part, as b5 has to some extent, you end up with a bland, brandless, savourless soup of a project.

In terms of community, what does that mean? Jeremy divides it into three :

1. Community of Bloggers. The b5 approach leads to a daily tidal wave of exciteable internal communications. I know, I’ve been there, and my inbox still has the stretch marks.

If the authors are putting so much into internal squabbling, they are losing force for their real work, filling up the webtitles. Syntagma has avoided this road by taking on serious, professional writers who plan their time and have no interest in endless forumizing.

2. Community of Readers. Communities of readers build for a variety of reasons. We have sites which haven’t had a single comment since the last Ice Age, and probably won’t till the Earth melts. That’s their nature.

One of our strongest webtitles, Royal Anecdotes, which gets up to 20,000 unique visitors on good days, has been hijacked as a forum by its readers. If you scroll through the posts, you’ll see many with 100 or so very passionate comments.

We never set out to become a “community play”, it just happened because the material struck a chord with a sizeable niche audience.

3. Community of Advertisers. Well, somehow I don’t think of advertisers on specific sites wasting time forumizing amongst themselves. Not sure what this means, other than having good relationships with your ad space buyers. All successful publishers do that as a matter of course.

So a “community play” is an artificial distinction and a bit of a luxury for a business. It may even divert energy from its real needs, and is a false category when set against the craft of publishing, which is what b5 does, whether they think so or not.

I still hold my ground on the point that b5 doesn’t pay enough attention to its publishing side and its overall image and branding. Jeremy is an ultra-smart guy. He won’t be unaware of the constructive critiques out there.

Someone said at a conference recently that certain brands should never invite user-generated content because they would be desecrated in the ensuing material. He cited AOL and one or two other big names.

It’s a demonstrable fact that b5media also invites a lot of hostility from its peers and other less well-informed people. Jason’s remarks on b5 are just rubbing in his conference point — for it was he who made them.