The final step in our reorganization has been taken. Syntagma Media is now a redundant name, except in the URL of this webtitle, where it will remain. It may, though, be resurrected as a holding company when Syntagma Television appears on your screens in 2008.

Dial Publishing — the print arm — has been completely separated off from the online business, which will now be incorporated in the UK as Syntagma Digital.

We’ve introduced these changes gradually to see how they feel in practice and whether we can live with them. The answer is, yes. Apart from the internet address of this site, all references to Syntagma Media will be eventually removed from the inventory.

The reason is not that we cease to be a media business, just that there are a lot of them out there. Anyone blogging about blogging these days refers to themselves as a media business. We are following our own path and the new titles reflect that.

Okay, it’s not such a big deal, but names are important as they become brands over time. Syntagma is the brand, digital is what we do, “media” is a given and doesn’t need stressing in the company name.

As for Dial Publishing, it will take on a life of its own as a print publisher of business and digital-publishing books. It will also cover our consultancy business and all other offline activities. Dial will no longer be referred to as the print arm of Syntagma Media.

So the process of reconstructing the business that began three months ago is almost complete. In a week or two we can get down to some real work at last — producing large amounts of quality digital content.

Note : Some domain names are currently pointing to this site. They include : SyntagmaDigital.com, SyntagmaTelevision.com and SyntagmaTV.com. These properties will be built in due course.

The word “blog” and its derivatives “blogger” and “blogging” must be the most commonly used words in the blogosphere. You simply can’t get away from them. Some bloggers use them in every other sentence — at least.

For me, each time I read one of them in a blog, it’s like a very large cow pat falling from the sky in front of me. Bloggers [splat] who give a running commentary on their blogs [splat] and their blogging [splat] and then do the same for other bloggers [splat] and their blogs [splat] really need to get away from their blogs [splat] more.

The whole subject of blogs, bloggers and blogging [splat, splat, splat] has been obsessed to death on the internet. Even if you use asterixes you can’t escape : as in bl*gs, bl*ggers and bl*gging [spl*t, spl*t, spl*t].

Don’t get me wrong, I love the art and freedom of ******** [*****], but I just don’t want to see that word again in case one day a cow pat lands on my head [splat].

You may have spotted the new header on Syntagma today. It’s a move away from the Romanesque capitals we’ve had for a while into an upper/lower case format with a different typeface (font) altogether.

The sub-header “The Vantage Point” also drops the company descriptions that more properly belong to Syntagma Media than the Syntagma webtitle. It’s been bugging me for a while, now it’s done.

You may guess that this is part of the ongoing reorganization and redefinition of the business prior to incorporation. You will be right.

The newest crib on the block for Syntagma Digital is the second of Guy Adams’s three new webtitles : The Dark Room – Literary Worlds of Horror, part of our Allusionz network magazine.

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in the British publishing company, Humdrumming.

Horror…for many years a fictional genre that has suffered from a less than sterling reputation.

If ever an argument against over-exposure exists in fiction writing then Horror is the perfect example. For hundreds of years writing about the darker things in life (both real and supernatural) was considered a rich and healthy pastime. Shakespeare was no stranger to the Grand Guignol of storytelling, Dickens was a sap for the ghostly tale…a glance at a school syllabus will see old staples as Stoker and Shelley deemed perfectly valid ‘classics’.

Also watch out for Guy’s The Hack’s Progress, which will be up and scribbling next week.

Read The Dark Room.

In previous posts I’ve looked at creating a digital network out of own-resources – bootstrapping — as a way of avoiding the venture capital squeeze — bear-hugging. Now it’s time for some specifics.

Lately, we’ve been looking back over the past 16 months of Syntagma Media’s existence and attempting to work out the full cost of the operation in monetary terms. Remember, it’s been done without VC finance, bank or Angel loans or equity sales of any kind. The only aid has been a credit card, which is cleared at the end of every month. Clearly someone must have borne the full cost.

We calculated all the costs of setup, fees for advice, authoring, design, general tech, plus all the usual business stuff. I also added in my own cost and resources at my standard consultancy rate. The sweep mainly included Syntagma Digital, but also the much smaller liabilities of Dial Publishing — our incubating print arm.

The total cost to my personal exchequer came to $250,000.

I must confess I was a little taken aback by that number. I hadn’t realized I had that amount of loose change floating about. But accountancy doesn’t lie.

Of course, there has been a good deal of income, especially in the past 6 — 9 months. All of that has also gone back into the business. So the bottom line sits on the question : is Syntagma Digital worth more than a quarter of a million bucks?

I’ll let you into a secret, I was offered more than that around four months ago, but the deal involved running someone else’s British business.

Setting up a digital content business then doesn’t come cheap. The fact is, we could have spent considerably more as, for example, our near contemporary b5media has. It’s very much a matter of priorities and some fine calculation of whether a particular expenditure will be cost-effective or not. In my experience (16 months worth) most expenditures are not.

Refining the art of spending is therefore top of the agenda when it comes to bloodsucking your business — I use that term instead of bootstrapping here because it helps to know that it’s your blood the business is sucking. That knowledge alone concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Finale : Sixteen months in, $250,000 down, working like a sugar-cane cutter, no end in sight. Is it all worth it? Wait for the book*. All the killer facts are there.

* The Syntagma Story by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing later this year.