It’s Midsummer day in the northern hemisphere. Time to write jolly, mocking posts about global warming (bring it on) — and, true to form, it’s not at all warm here in the West Country of England.

The ancient Chinese used to say that winter was born on Midsummer day. If that sounds pessimistic, the corollary is that summer is born on Midwinter day. It just never feels like it, though.

Last night, as always, a great collection of esotericists, sun worshippers, astrologers and oddballs assembled at Stonehenge overnight to watch the sun rise, as their ancestors did 3000 or more years ago. As ever, with the first rays of the sun peeping over the Heel Stone outside the circle, the gathering throng starts to dream about … breakfast. Human nature never changes.

I’m told it was cold and wet last night, but that many long drafts of mead and local ale made it tolerable at least. Good luck to them. I’m all in favour of noble traditions being kept up, so long as it doesn’t involve me.

Syntagma wishes all its noble readers a happy Midsummer day (Midwinter in Australia) and a great summer to come.

It’s never pleasant deleting or permanently archiving poorly-performing sites that have become a drain on a network, but it has to be done. Apart from good housekeeping, they affect the bottom line and reduce the profitability contributed by other hard-working sites.

I’ve been pruning and paring for a while now, but the next couple of weeks will see a final push towards a more balanced network.

To begin the process, I’ve started with my own personal blog, which has been up for all of a week. Why? I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write about ideas, phenomena, events and things. I never like to write about myself, so I’m not much use as a blogger.

Blogging, in its native sense of web log, is writing about yourself. Any other form of writing, even on blog platforms, is really reportage and commentary. To me, blogs are introspective and usually egotistical. Twitter is full of bloggers who imagine there’s an audience for their “tweets” : I’m going to the coffee shop … I’m having a latte … I’m sending an email to Fred … etcetera. There are even feeds for this stuff. Birdseed for birdbrains.

Why do they do it? Dunno, but it must be cathartic to imagine there’s an audience hanging on your every move. It’s the everyday equivalent of the celebrity who won’t leave the house without a film crew in tow.

It’s the same with blog posts. When I moved Syntagma to its present domain, I read through 500 or so old posts intending to bring them over. In the end I transferred 50 or so. The rest simply didn’t stand the test of time. They were either hopelessly wrong, or just plain batty.

Blog posts are essentially conversations — one-way most of the time. If you were able to replay your recent voice conversations with other people, would you actually want to?

So when I read an article by Dave Winer yesterday on the BBC website, I was surprised that he’s prepared to pay a largish sum of money to Google or Amazon to host his online bloggings “in perpetuity”. He even suggests they might be beamed into space so they’ll last forever.

Interesting that he chooses Google or Amazon. Google is less than a decade old, and Amazon can’t have been more than 15 years in the online retail business. Can you imagine either of them being around in 50 years, let alone 50 centuries.

Ancient Alexandria was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria was a wonder, preserving the knowledge and science of the ancient world. To have your work on a scroll or codex in that place would ensure it lasted forever.

Then a bunch of fundamentalist Christians came along and burnt it to the ground. After that “success” they did it again later, with the works of the Gnostics, which were only rediscovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt where they were hidden underground in pots. The pots proved more durable than all of man’s artifice in protecting ancient knowledge.

Why would Google or Amazon fare any better than the Great Library of Alexandria? They won’t, for course. Nothing lasts forever.

I would suggest Dave carefully sifts through his online archives, choosing only the bits that are still interesting today, and have them printed into durable books on quality paper and in robust bindings. He should then donate copies to libraries around the world, like the British Library, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, etcetera. He would then have a better chance of his work seeing out the next 500 years than relying on Google and Amazon.

He should also bury a few copies in earthenware pots, in Death Valley, California, the Negev and Sahara deserts. Somewhere hot and dry, or they’ll rot over time. Climate change is the big imponderable here, of course.

On balance, I think he should just delete them, as I’ve done with my personal blog. Then, like Shakespeare and Homer, his work may be preserved in living memory by public demand, not by hosted servers paid ahead until the end of time.

Chronicles of wasted time … in praise of ladies dead and knights sublime. After Shakespeare

Silly question, I know, given that bloggers are said to hit the keyboard naked more times than not. If there’s no need to dress up in your best bib and tucker, why bother?

I am though talking about “entrepreneurs”, not bloggers, who can descend to the lowest depths at the drop of a hat — or anything else for that matter.

But, since I now have a blog, I suppose I’ll have to look into the matter of the dress code for posting on MySpace.

I’m often reminded that my standard photo online is of me in a t-shirt pictured in the south of Spain. So I’ve been looking through my photo archive to find a shot of moi in a business suit. They are very few in number I can tell you, in fact, vanishingly small.

Happily I disovered a solitary example — I had to scan it from a 6in x 4in photograph, so most of the colours are too dark.

I’m guessing though that most internet entrepreneurs would be unable to find such a shot in their own picture galleries. Unless, of course, they had won an award and were captured collecting the prize.

And what about the money guys? Do VCs, who wring so much sweat out of their hapless prey, wear suits as a deliberate ploy to intimidate their laid back customers?

I really don’t know, having never met a venture capitalist in my life.

But it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?

Our designer, Thord Hedengren, writing in 901am, complains about the low value of the dollar. How would that affect him? Because like many people plying their trade on the internet he’s paid in dollars but lives outside the U.S.

He complains : “So I’m looking at my Paypal account and realize I won’t be moving any money anytime soon. The dollar’s down, has been for quite some time, and that means us non-US people make less for the same work.”

Currently, there are two dollars to every GB pound and, since a pound buys very roughly what a dollar buys in the States, it means we at Syntagma Media receive something like half the fee that an American company picks up, even when we are paid at the same rate.

Of course, it would work to our advantage if we were paid in sterling while our outgoings were designated in dollars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The internet is part of the dollar zone and will continue to be.

Thord goes on : “I lost equivalent of a grand (perhaps more when you read this, or less, depending on how the dollar moves compared to the Swedish crown) recently, just due to the dollar being down.”

Now I don’t know what the value of the Swedish Kroner is off-hand, but if it’s anything like the euro, he could be in an even worse situation than we British are.

The American economy is still chuntering along, despite a mammoth overseas trade deficit which is driving the dollar value down and making American goods and services cheaper for us abroad. This corrective mechanism clearly hasn’t gone far enough. Mostly this is due to Americans buying cheap Chinese goods — and who can blame them. The Chinese dollar surplus is then invested back into dollar assets on Wall Street. So the stock market moves up and cheap goods flood in. Everyone’s happy.

Except us worldwide writers and content providers who live in parts of Europe and get paid in dollars.

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?