It’s been wet and windy for days here so my customary morning walk has been disrupted for a week. Today though, I braved the elements as a startling piece of intelligence assailed my ears.

You may remember that I rather fancied Rougement Castle as our new HQ – a bit fanciful even though it was up for sale. Then it sold to a property company. End of story? Well, not quite.

First off, I spotted this banner draped over the splendid admin buildings in the courtyard of the ancient pile — now renamed Exeter Castle.

Rougemont becomes the “Covent Garden of the West” with “Exceptional Retail and Entertainment Opportunities”. William the Conqueror must be twirling in his tomb, not to mention the Roman Proconsul who built the original walls nearly 2000 years ago.

But my real reason for going there this morning was because of the Lodge, neatly situated just within the main gates.

Now that is a very nice building indeed. Lots of space and wonderful views of the castle ghosts walking the ramparts at night. And guess what?

It’s for sale or to let. I’m going to inquire after the particulars to see if it’s suitable for us. The only thing that might put me off is all that entertainment billed for the place. It might be a tad noisy at night.

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Jason Calacanis has just launched Mahalo, a search engine with real humans making some of the decisions. Crazy? Nothing wrong with humans. A bit slow, but generally much more intuitive and accurate than machines. It’s still in alpha so we must wait awhile before testing it properly.

Like most people I suppose, I searched for my name, “John Evans”, and it wasn’t there. But Mahalo did offer to email me when it was. Now that’s what I call service. You search for a name and then you wait for an email. They are though only five months into a five-year project. Nice touch.

I also searched for Syntagma, and bingo, we came 2nd and third on the list, below Syntagma Square, Athens, but above all the other companies now calling themselves Syntagma. Result!

So what’s the idea behind the human operators? This is from the press release :

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?

Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP? It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

This is an interesting concept and it will be good to watch it mature. I’ll be waiting for that email too. The release doesn’t specify whether the Guides will be responsible for taking the search on from my query, but I guess that’s the way the system works.

So long as I come top, I’ll be content.

Try Mahalo yourself.

It must be a quiet day for news when people start showing you pictures of their desks. It could be a lot worse, of course, so we shouldn’t complain. Duncan Riley did it yesterday, and I’ve seen any number around the blogosphere.

My excuse is that it’s been raining here for days so I can’t fulfil last week’s promise of pics taken along the Devon coast. I also get a bit twitchy when I can’t photograph anything. I know that sounds like an addiction but I call it Window-On-The-World Syndrome.

So, yes, here’s a snap of my desk in the Syntagma Towers’ office :

The box on the left is a Windows Vista machine, which I use nearly all the time now. On the right, is the old XP box. There’s still a lot of stuff left on it which I can’t move over : programs incompatible with Vista and mountains of Word and Excel documents.

Incidentally, I’ve discovered a good way of transferring material between computers without fitting a cable between them or burning a disk. Just put it in a Gmail attachment — you’re allowed up to 20MB now — and email it to yourself. Switch on the other computer, and there it is waiting for you. But I expect you knew that.

The boiling question of the day is, what does your desk say about you? Is it cluttered or uncluttered? And if you think that’s a silly inquiry, one business guru wrote an entire book about cluttered desks. I suppose it was a gap in the market.

In case you missed the first pic, here’s a wider shot showing a bit of context. Not much, but you can’t have everything :

But I’ve entertained you long enough …

The Syntagma Story (continued)

Straws in the wind are important signals for digital farmers. They tell them crucially which way the wind is blowing, its strength, and something about the season/cycle.

There are now a lot of straws in the wind for digital networks (or, for purists, blog networks). BlogNetworkWatch no longer covers blog networks. It’s become a sort of mini Blog Herald. Many networks have shut up shop or are quietly getting on with their business underneath the radar.

So what is the state of the digital network business in these apparently doldrum conditions? As I’ve been writing here for a time, waiting for a knock on the door from the Business Development Officer of Yahoo/AOL/Google, whatever, is a sterile career move, and always was.

When Jason Calacanis announced Weblogs Inc was doing $1m a year on Adsense, followed quickly by its sale to AOL for $25m and a seat on the board, networks of content providers became the new Klondike. Lots of people moved in, including Weblog Empire (Duncan Riley) and b5media (Jeremy Wright and other names from the starry firmament). I worked for both before moving quickly on to form Syntagma Media.

Even then there were two ways you could play a digital network :

1. Build infrastucture and content platforms quickly so it stands out against the competition. Go for size and scale before anything else. Then, with a bit of luck, the BDO will come knocking on your humble door. Bingo! Blogging bliss.

2. Optimize the network for income — remember WIN was making $1m a year from Adsense alone before it sold out.

Here at Syntagma we followed Route 1, aiming always to reinvest income in exchange for size (55 sites and rising), and pushing the envelope into new fields, like network magazines and large retail portals. The business plan also included a move into IP-TV in 2008.

However, a major rethink has been forced on us through a number of events. Not the least is a lucrative publishing offer landing on my lap and, yes, straws in the wind. There are no big buyers of digital networks out there now, and even those that are sold have to settle for a bit upfront followed by a share in the income thereafter — in effect turning the owner into a salaryman of the buyer.

The really interesting point though, is that once you go from Route 1 and start exploring Route 2, something highly beneficial emerges. When you stop pouring all of your treasure into endless expansion, you discover that you can start paying yourself a handsome income just by running the network as a normal business, capping the size and scale, and going for quality and depth, rather than extension and constant revolution.

A network like Syntagma can easily pay its owner a six-figure salary (and rising) from a steady-as-she-goes policy of improvement and quality delivery. That assumes the business is around two-years old (we’re two in October) and has a bunch of mature inventory.

In the end, what you get out of a project is more important than prestige, size, or future bonanzas, real or imagined — try explaining it to your bank manager.

So that’s the subtle shift I’ve made in the running of Syntagma. From a network that, at its peak, employed 15 authors, with five vacancies outstanding, to a trim 30 to 40 sites with maybe six high-quality freelances working. We are now a medium-sized digital publisher aiming for depth and quality. One that pays its owner a decent salary, allowing him to spend time on the book deals.

I’m guessing that many network owners have already come to the same conclusion. It’s not astro science after all. If Route 1 seems like a distant dream, even a total mirage, then Route 2 holds some surprises in store. It’s the old bootstrapper’s adage that, the lower your costs, the less you have to turnover to get into the comfort zone. Syntagma is now officially a Route 2 business. Our motto is :

Mind you, if any BDOs are in the area, do drop into Syntagma Towers for a cup of tea. (The champagne has already been auctioned off).

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.