I was asked the other day if I’m an internet optimist. My first reaction was to say, yes. After all, I make a lot of my living online. But on reflection I knew it was more complicated than that.

Over the years, I’m not ashamed to say, I’ve become something of an internet cynic. By cynic I don’t mean opponent, just wary of its claims, rushes to judgement and general enthusiasms.

I’ve found you can enjoy the internet better — and profit from it more — if you know its strengths and weaknesses, while always erring on the downside.

The upside of the internet is surprisingly slim, though occasionally explosive. Prudent people factor out the explosive aspect because it rarely happens.

So what are we left with? Quite a lot as it happens.

Unlike Dick Whittington’s London Town which was said to be paved with gold — an unlikely story — the internet is paved with slime. Were it a game of snakes and ladders, it would be 95 percent snake. The key to success is distinguishing the very few ladders from the endless serpentine slopes.

There are some things on the net that work, and many more that don’t. For example, although the main niches for content and advertising are crammed full of competition, they still work their magic — if you can get ahead of the crowd.

The so-called long tail — which gladdens the hearts of sentimental neo-Marxists — is a myth which only the likes of Amazon can make pay. Whipping a dead donkey delivers more than operating in some micro-niches.

I’ve learned never to heed the words of enthusiasts who don’t care about financial returns. If that sounds cynical, just put yourself in the place of someone looking to make an income online. “Try knitting or quilting,” they’re urged, “historic trains or Victorian ballads. There’s a huge audience out there.”

“Out There” is about as useful as “Tham Thar Hills” where the gold was supposed to be.

This is not really cynicism, but stoicism. Cultivating the art of effectiveness by cutting away all that wastes time and doesn’t work. Why expend effort on that which drains.

Syntagma’s advice? Get into the mainstream, but be different. Compete on quality, but be distinctive. Don’t listen to anyone without practical online experience. And, above all, filter out the white noise and the useless information.

It’s not difficult. It just takes a stoical outlook — and a little bit of cynicism.

So what’s new?

Yes, I’ve got a blog. I thought it was about time to lift my game with Google. Also, I’ve wanted to separate my personal stuff — such as it is — from the business for a while now. Some internal developments at Syntagma Towers are pushing me in that direction too.

There’s not much on it yet. I do have a lot of plans for it, however, so you are welcome to set foot on its pristine pages. Mind the wet floor.

Find it at : http://www.johnmevans.com

With internet advertising increasing rapidly, the need for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big Ad Lite service has become obvious, especially to users of weblog technology. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. [...]

Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

On Saturdays, I permit myself a small insult as reward for all the hard work during the week. Here’s today’s juicy snippet.

A U.S Congressman is reported to have said of another :

“Like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight, he shines and stinks.”

Thanks to Matthew Parris in today’s Times (London) for that great one-liner.

The question then arises, who does that remind you of over here in Britain? Answers on a postcard, please, to : 10 Downing Street, London, SW1.

I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.

Syntagma readers may be interested in a review of the much-hyped UK Channel 4 documentary on the death of Princess Diana, which was broadcast last night. It raised many questions about press freedom and the so-called wisdom of crowds, beloved of social networkers and the Web 2.0 internet.

You can read it over on our sister site, Royal Anecdotes :

The C4 Diana Documentary Reviewed.

If most of us were asked who our favourite modern artist was, we’d be stuck for a reply. Any other time period and we might say, Turner, Picasso, Cezanne, Constable …

But today we simply don’t know too many modern artists, and those we do tend to specialize in unmade beds and pathetic collages of everday objects.

I did a piece a while ago about an artist who sent a sculpted head, mounted on a bought-in plinth, to the Royal Academy’s prestigious Summer Exhibition in London. Unfortunately, the head got separated from the plinth during transit.

A panel of worthies duly examined the entries. They rejected the head but accepted the plinth, which was probably made in China.

However, all is not lost. The lovely Amy Crehore, a favourite of our own Marshall Sponder over at Art NYC, continues to paint delectable pictures with a faintly mythic quality. Here’s her latest. it’s called Wild Cat Fever :

You can view it over on Art NYC.

You can also see an interview with Amy Crehore over on our Celebrity at Work site.

This morning I headed down to the Quay area of Exeter in our continuing quest for a new HQ for Syntagma Media. The Quay is now a rather upmarket resort for both residents and tourists.

Although Exeter is a little way inland from the sea at Exmouth, the river Exe runs through it. In Elizabethan times (1500s) they made the Exe navigable for cargo boats beyond the Port of Topsham by building a canal and quay in Exeter itself. The picture below shows part of the waterfront.

The Watergate (no connection to President Nixon), built in the ancient Roman town wall, was the last of the Gates to be constructed.

Below you can catch a flavour of the touristy atmosphere now with one of the riverboats ready to chug off.

And here’s a sniff of the older feel to the place. Each of these warehouses and storage buildings is now converted to modern use.

Ah, a welcome wateringhole — The Prospect Inn — one of the many old pubs along the quay. Loading those boats with wool and woollen products must have been thirsty business, as is taking photos.

So that’s the Quay. Not a lot for us there, alas, but worth photographing nonetheless.

You can see the whole set of these pictures in larger sizes by clicking on the Flickr logo at the top of the sidebar.

Well, $12,107 to be exact, but believe me that is peanuts for a working, potentially-profitable business. What’s more, the owner, Guy Kawasaki, is also promoting it in the process of explaining how he did it. It doesn’t get much better.

The deal is to cut out as many operators as possible, with the exception of the tech guys to design the site, and some lawyers. Without those, it could have been done much cheaper, but probably not without anxiety.

Here are a couple of his 26 bullet points that caught my eye :

* 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

* 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

* 4. I learned four lessons launching Truemors: There’s really no such thing as bad PR. $12,000 goes a very long way these days. You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away. Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.

So-called Web 2.0 businesses can be set up for peanuts — we did that with Syntagma Media because we weren’t sure if it would ever make any money. Our lack of faith has been amply rewarded in monetary terms ever since. Why invest money in something unpredictable if you can bootstrap the business from a credit card? A good idea is not more of a good idea because it has been funded by VCs, and you might just be selling chunks of a very good idea indeed.

Kawasaki is a shrewd guy, and not very experienced in technical terms. In fact, he’s quite like me really, minus the rough edges. So it’s great to see him make a go of Truemors. We wish him well and great fortune to come.