I’ve noticed that a number of people are scheduling particular walks for taking photos of their town or city. Robert Scoble has named the idea “Photowalking” on the principle perhaps that everything should have a name.

The Quay, Exeter

I’ve been Photowalking — combining taking pictures with my morning five-mile walk — ever since I bought a digital camera last year. It’s a great way to add value to mere exercise. My project — I’ll call it PhotoExeter — is to photograph the city I live in through this summer, trying to capture the face and atmosphere of it when it looks its best, and is filled with tourists. You can see the results so far by clicking the Flickr logo at the top of the sidebar.

After a brilliant March and April, we’ve had six weeks of wet and windy weather here, so no Photowalking. In fact, the whole country has been under the cosh. As I write, people are losing their lives across the Midlands of England in the worst flooding for years.

Back to Photowalking. It’s really a great extension to Fatblogging because it keeps the interest up on what might be dreary rambles across familiar ground. As I walk, I find myself noticing things, large and small, that might otherwise have passed unseen. I also take many detours I’ve never explored before — maybe an 18th-century street straight out of a Dickens novel. The fact is, Photowalking insists you walk farther, if not faster, than you otherwise would.

As someone who used to run marathons, I know that interest is crucual to exercise. A date with a race a month or so ahead, seeking to beat your personal best, or a slightly better runner going along with you.

But Photowalking beats even personal ambition as a spur to distance travelled. For it drags in different parts of the brain. If exercise utilizes the left-brain — all those time calculations and forecasts along the way — then Photowalking adds curiosity, perspective, artistic appreciation of views and architecture, and delving into historical information. Classic right-brain stuff.

I’m only sorry I have to write about it today. The rain is beating down outside my window like stair-rods, and Photowalking is out of the question.

It’s back to blogging, I suppose. Oh, the tedium!

He’s gone!

After 10 seemingly endless years, the old ham has gone.

We’ve criticized him enough on this non-political site so don’t intend to give him a Syntagma drubbing today.

A colleague who knew him well — and liked him — summed Blair up this way : “He’s charming, courteous and kind. He has all the manners of a top British schoolboy. He means well, and has worked hard for the country.”

You sense a “but” coming and you’re right.

“But he has no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. He knows very little about anything outside his narrow specialism of the criminal law, and believes that charm (his) is all he needs to be Prime Minister. He can’t even send an email and finds computers utterly baffling.”

Tony Blair is hopeless at detail, mastering only the emotional tone of a brief. Decisions were made on the basis of, “Does this make me look cool?” That quality made him a star in America, especially after his unqualified support following 9/11.

In Britain, however, his lack of grip and concentration meant he botched every level of domestic policymaking, and leaves the country in a worse state than it was in the mid-1970s when another Labour government brought it to its knees economically.

Verdict? He didn’t do the detail, and Britain suffered the result.

He will not be missed — at home at least.

We’ve been experimenting with a new system of content production here at Syntagma. Apart from our team of proven, regular authors, we’ve been driving newer sites from a small base of in-house writers — people who also work in some capacity for us and have expertise in specific fields.

It will be coming on-stream from next Monday, July 2.

The reason for this new approach is that we’ve adopted a tighter focus for the Syntagma network, specializing in certain areas we know to be effective revenue-earners. We can better manage such a team from within, rather than relying on a sprawling web of freelances across the globe.

Of course, we’ve still got some writers spread around the world, but these are authors who have proved reliable over time. In other words, we will become more like a business producing print magazines in structure, than a typical blog network — a model we’ve been moving away from for a while now.

We’re closing the Allusionz network magazine on July 1, and will be using our three remaining portals as the base for a variety of new activities, not all conventional or expected.

As a small, compact business, we have great flexibility of manoeuvre. We don’t have to stand still or follow the rest. We won’t.

New sources of finance mean we are tentatively moving away from the cash-flow-techniques model we’ve adopted thus far, although we will never go down the venture capital route for reasons given here many times.

So there will be new energy and new blood next month here at Syntagma.

Okay, I’m going to get a little bit snobby here. Unheard of, I know, but needs must.

YouGov the British online polling outfit has come up with a list of internet names which drive people up the wall. I’m climbing the wall just looking at them, especially as the list contains some of my very unfavourite terms, incuding “blog” and “wiki”. How can any serious person ever use the word, wiki? It sounds like a Tibetan yak.

Here’s the list in descending order of gruesomeness :

1. Folksonomy (groan, but it shouldn’t be top)
2. Blogosphere (okay, number 2 is about right)
3. Blog (now that should be #1 on anyone’s list)
4. Netiquette (pretty harmless, but what the hell)
5. Blook (now that is a bloody disgrace)
6. Webinar (hmm, doesn’t hit me viscerally)
7. Vlog (talk about mangling the English language)
8. Social networking (I’ve already run a mile just typing it)
9. Cookie (some things are just born to crumble)
10 = Wiki (should have been strangled at birth and higher in the list)
= Podcast (it sounds so insignificant, who let it live?)
= Avatar (Hindu holymen have got a long-standing option on this one)
= User-Generated Content (a mashup with almost no meaning).

The poll of 2000 internet users was done to mark the 10th anniversary of the word “weblog”. I wonder if any of them will last another 10 years?