I don’t normally get caught up in the spasms of patriotic fever that grip the nation whenever England or a GB team reach a major sporting final — which thankfully is quite rare.

However, Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final in Paris between what was recently a no-hopers’ England team, and the seemingly unbeatable South Africa, is catching everyone’s attention, not least in that sleepy hollow of scholarly values, the Syntagma office.

One of the reasons is that in the next few days the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is about to enact one of the great betrayals in history — signing the shamefully dishonest and authoritarian European Constitution while reneging on his promise of a referendum.

This act by Brown has been described by the all-party House of Commons Scrutiny Committee as “akin to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938″.

The rugby final provides a distraction for the dire political events happening not so many miles away in Lisbon. So, while Syntagma wishes “the lads” well in Paris, we simultaneously call down a multitude of plagues on the houses of all those involved in the Great Brussels Stitch-Up.

Oh, and I should mention that Englishman Lewis Hamilton could become Formula One World Champion in Brazil on Sunday.

We wish our great sportsmen the best of British over the weekend, while to our unsporting politicians, deep, unremitting gloom.

I’m noticing that when Adsense users put more inserts than the allowed three on their web pages, the fourth now produces an ugly error message.

Previously, it would be cut off allowing you to post a small ad block at the bottom of each post, as we do. Anyone accessing an archived post as a single page would then see the ads as normal in every post on the site.

Now, it strikes me that the old arrangement would not be a problem for Google, especially since it obviously adds to their income from older posts. It helps the content provider too.

So Google have changed the way this works for a specific reason. It can’t be because there’s a drain on Google’s resources from the old system, a cut-off at three appearances is relatively easy to arrange.

And a high total number of ads may not come into it, either. Syntagma only uses two ads per block, making six in all in a package of ten posts on a page. If we used a sidebar frame with six ads in it, that would only count as one use.

So why this problem? Anyone know?

So next week Gordon Brown is to sign Britain up to the European constitution, while simultaneously reneging on a manifesto promise to give the people a referendum on the issue — simply because he knows he will lose it.

Are any of those actions justifiable in a moral universe, let alone a fully franchised democracy? Do I need to answer that?

Brown’s claim — and Tony Blair’s — is that the new document is different from the one they made their promise on. That is despite everyone who has examined both agree that up to 95 percent of it remains the same, especially the legal framework.

Brown further claims that Britain is protected by four “red lines” beyond which he will not go. These are policy areas such as foreign affairs, legal policy, etcetera.

It has a sniff of cordite about it. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries British soldiers wore red tunics and were known as Redcoats. When surrounded, outnumbered and in dire straits, they would form four red lines and stand in the famous British Square formation. By holding their nerve, and with great discipline, they would lay down a deadly barrage of fire against the enemy, whether it was Zulu or American.

Quite often they would break out and win the battle. Sometimes they were overwhelmed and fought bravely to the last man. Whatever resulted, the Square was always a last desperate position.

Now Gordon Brown is defining this island nation as “four red lines”. Nothing more to show for two thousand years of history and an empire upon which the sun never set. Such defeatism is pretty hard to take.

New Labour, a political party of social Marxism and clunking incompetence, is finally getting its revenge on a Britain it has always despised. Armed with a new Scottish Prime Minister who allowed Scotland a referendum on independence, it refuses England, which is 85 percent of the poplulation, a plebicite on its freedom — from Brussels.

If you’re in Britain, support a referendum now.

The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), its markup language, HTML, and its protocols, like HTTP, will today become a member of the most exclusive club of all.

Some members of the Order of Merit

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a modest Englishman who arguably did more to create the internet than anyone else — especially the boastful Al Gore — will today receive the Order of Merit from the Queen. The Order is limited to 24 of the most distinguished people on the planet. It’s in the personal gift of the Queen, not the politicians, so carries far greater kudos than the buyable baubles dished out to friends of Downing Street.

There will be no fuss or fanfare, no procession of the great and the good. The members will wear simple lounge suits, and few onlookers will even notice the cars entering Buckingham Palace this morning, or know that the occupants will have lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip.

Before the main event, the Queen will have a private chat with the newest member, Sir Tim, and present him with his decoration, a small blue and crimson cross with a laurel wreath in the centre and a gold inscription : “For Merit”.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM

The Order has existed for 105 years and had a total of 174 members. Recipients have included, Thomas Hardy, Sir Edward Elgar, Florence Nightingale, Henry Moore and Sir Winston Churchill. More recently, Margaret Thatcher was made an OM, as was Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons.

It’s a suitable honour for Berners-Lee, whose work is made use of by almost everyone on Earth on a daily basis. It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such an impact on the life of the planet and yet is almost totally unknown. No Paris Hilton he. Membership of this elite Order is perhaps the perfect decoration for such a modest man.

The words “For Merit” are well chosen. Today’s world is full of trashy icons with no merit except a talent for self-promotion. Many crash and burn like the flimsy creations they are. Yet there are still people out there like Berners-Lee, but their depth of intellect and pioneering spirit are not valued by many, or the populist media that serve them.

Thankfully Britain still has ways of celebrating them, albeit with a small cross and lunch with the Monarch and peers of their merit.

Syntagma salutes Sir Tim, OM, and celebrates his achievements.

Now we know what will happen to the Australian rugby team when they return to Oz after their defeat by England in the World Cup.

It’s reported that an Italian tourist who swallowed anti-freeze in the north of Queensland was admitted to a hospital intensive care unit and fed a case of vodka over three days.

Of course, that begs the question of who uses anti-freeze in the north of Queensland, but we’ll let that pass. It seems the poor sap was hooked up to a drip of pure alcohol, and when that ran out, doctors bought a case of vodka and fed him four bottles a day for three days.

Strewth, the hangover doesn’t bear thinking about. The doctors say he was kept in a “medically-induced” coma for three weeks, so probably didn’t notice the after-effects.

If the vodka had run out, would they have used Fosters lager, the amber fluid of Crocodile Dundee, or the XXXX variety? Difficult medical choices for the Aussie quacks obviously. The old toper’s excuse, “I only drink for medicinal reasons” now has new backing.

But if the patient had died, what would they have put on the death certificate? Cause of death : acute alcoholism aggravated by a small quantity of anti-freeze?

So will the defeated Australian rugby team receive the same treatment? They’ll be queuing up for it, mate!

Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated Wordpress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”

In this era of the worldwide credit crunch caused by rogue lenders sluicing off the debt of America’s trailer-park poor, it’s good to have some positve news for a change.

Once again, advertising on the internet is roaring ahead, up 27 percent in the first half of 2007.

Let’s not beat about the bush, here’s a big chunk of the press release from the Interactive Advertising Bureau :

NEW YORK, October 4, 2007 – The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) today released the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report covering the second quarter and the first six months of 2007. Internet advertising revenues (U.S.) for the first six months of 2007 were nearly $10 billion, setting yet another new record and representing a nearly 27 percent increase over the first half of 2006. Internet advertising revenue totaled nearly $5.1 billion for the second quarter of 2007, exceeding the $5 billion mark for the first time in a quarter, a 25.4 percent increase over the same period in 2006.

“The torrid growth of interactive advertising revenue persists and these results are really no surprise but very welcome news,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “More and more marketers have embraced the reality that interactive is the fulcrum on which their brand strategies need to be based and we expect robust growth to continue.”

“The first six months of 2007 has continued the trend over the past several years of strong sequential growth,” said David Silverman, partner, Entertainment, Media & Communications Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “The growth, which was led by strong increases in the consumer advertising sector, continues to point to the mainstream acceptance of the medium and advertisers’ continuing reliance on it.”

“The Internet is well established as a key media distribution channel for driving advertising,” said Pete Petrusky, Director, Entertainment, Media & Communications Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers. “The recent results demonstrate that advertisers recognize the continued growth in the online audience and the growing opportunity to target and monetize that audience.”

This is very good news for those of us who earn part of our income by providing ad space online. Long may it continue to flourish.

This is the third and final segment of a recent interview I gave to Gerry Reynolds, a retail analyst, and which is published in Syntagma with permission. Read the other two parts here : #

Gerry : I’d like now to look in more detail at the essence of the business, its income, i.e. advertising. What are the main parameters of online advertising?

John : Online advertising is relatively new, so it still has more than a shade of the Wild West about it. It’s improving all the time, though, and growing very fast.

For small publishers, the breakthrough was Google’s Adsense, which is a text-based system aimed at generating clickthroughs, which in turn produce income linked to the market price of certain keywords sold by auction as “Adwords”. You can see examples of Adsense at the foot of each of the first three posts on any of our sites.

If that sounds complicated, it boils down to “pay-per-click” instead of pay-per-sale. The pay you get per click varies from a few cents to more than $10, depending on the product or service involved.

If you think of Adsense as plain old classified ads with an electronic counter attached, you’ll get the point.

Gerry : But Adsense is going out of favour now, isn’t it?

John : You do need high trafficked sites for it to work, which is why it’s the darling of the Google gamers, the SEO wizards who seed their sites with high-priced keywords to generate traffic and clickthroughs.

Most decent blogs will have traffic of between 10,000 and 50,000 page views a month. That’s not enough to make useful gains from Adsense. Significantly, though, it’s enough to generate hundreds of dollars a month from “text-link ads” which are paid for in advance by actual advertisers. There are now agencies which sell the ads for you and take a 50 percent cut for their pains.

Gerry : Does Syntagma use these agencies?

John : We do, but we also sell our own text-links off our inventory. They tend to give better value to the advertisers because we can be flexible with discounts, especially where a lot of space is available.

Gerry : So text links are the most important form of advertising for you?

John : In our first two years, they have been. The cumulative income from hundreds of text links over 40 to 50 sites, can be very impressive indeed, especially compared with affiliate shareouts, which depend on sales, and CPM ads which give small sums for each ad impression.

Gerry : What other systems have you tried?

John : I’ve tried them all. On high traffic sites, Adsense and affiliate links do well, because they are a numbers game. But the bulk of sites will be below, say, 100,000 page views a month. These need to be monetized in a different way to bring home the bacon. However, if these sites are in the right topic areas, they can generate good monthly incomes from text links.

Gerry : What are the right topic areas?

John : Click through our inventory contents list in the sidebar of Syntagma and you’ll see those that sell out on text link ads positioned below the header.

Gerry : So anyone can do this?

John : In theory, but not quite. Many “blog” networks have closed because the owners didn’t have the stamina to see the job through. Syntagma has a good reputation in the space, which we’ve earned over two years, and is seen as a mature player. That attracts advertisers to us.

In our first year, income was sparse and I funded the operation from my credit card. In the second year, when I had learned the lessons of profilgacy, oneupmanship and other money-draining practices, I slimmed the whole shebang down to an optimum size and reach, which now makes money.

I don’t want to beat my own drum, but it does take tenacity and a great deal of shrewdness to stay in the game when you’re losing funds every day. The secret is to stay in the mainstream in terms of market niches, but to do it differently from everybody else, so you stay ahead of the crowd.

Gerry : You don’t mind giving your secrets away?

John : I’m always glad to help anyone who’s starting out or who is currently not succeeding. There’s enough money in online business for everyone who wants to claim it. Each success story expands the envelope. It’s not a finite pot. It’s a very dynamic marketplace, and we’re all pioneers here.

Gerry : What are the other forms of advertising that you may use in your third year?

John : I’m always experimenting, sometimes below the radar and on sites not part of our list.

Sponsorship of sites by substantial corporations is a possibility, and I’ve had talks with a few such players. Also, Google is developing an ad network with the aim of filling neglected inventory all around the internet with their ads. It’s a great concept, especially if it gets away from the necessity of hosting dedicated ad serving software, which is a nightmare for relatively small operations. That’s the Next Big Thing in the space, and all the other majors are following suit right now.

Gerry : You seem to have an aversion to spending one penny more than you have to on anything.

John : I operate a “blood from stone” policy. In a low margin business, you need to find the sweet spot where profits are generated from minimum costs. So far, I’ve been successful in this. I don’t intend to overreach the limits imposed by basic cash-flow techniques, nor make assumptions that I can’t nail down.

Syntagma’s motto is Dr Johnson’s phrase : “Example is more efficacious than precept”. Which can be translated as “successful actions speak louder than words”, or “A warehouse full of bacon is a better investment than a forestful of wild boar”.

Gerry : What about subscription models of funding?

John : They have been tried, mostly on crack information sites, and usually with disastrous results. The New York Times is coming off a part-sub model right now, and so are many other newspaper titles.

People expect their online experience to be free, for the simple reason that when they click away from a page there’s nothing left, unlike with a newspaper or magazine. It’s fairly simple psychology. That’s why we sell the fleeting use of their eyeballs. There’s nothing else to sell online that has real value.

Gerry : I love that, “the fleeting use of their eyeballs”. Are people aware of what you’re doing to them?

John : Good God, no. Everyone’s very protective of their eyeballs. If they thought we were renting them out, they’d shoot us.

Gerry : And so on to year three.

John : From October 20, yes.

Gerry : Is it going to be a good ‘un?

John : The best so far, undoubtedly, but the words “chickens” and “hatched” loom large in my consciousness.

Gerry : As ever!

John : As ever and a day.