I’ve never really thought that Warren Buffett (pictured left) would want to invest in Syntagma Media, but an entrepreneur can dream.

Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and one of the top two or three richest people on the planet — heck, he even owns a hedge fund, is known for making shrewd investments. Where Warren burrows, others follow — like rabbits.

Like all good business folk he’s noticed that the dollar has been on the slide for quite a while, agonizingly compensating for America’s huge foreign trade deficit. Meanwhile, the poor old pound sterling is about to hit the starry heights of $2.10, making the greenback worth all of 47 pence (45 on PayPal).

For those of us paid in Uncle Sam’s Monopoly money that’s quite a hit we’re taking over here in the UK and Europe. We’ll be reduced to Dickensian conditions by year end, mark my words. We may even apply for Marshall Aid.

Anyway, back to Warren Buffett. He’s now announced he is NOT investing in any business whose income is designated in dollars.

Shrewd? Yes.

Scrooge? You said it. That’s why I say Buffett has rejected Syntagma Media.

On top of all that we have the credit crunch? Is that a new breakfast cereal? It’s the result of American banks giving mortgages to the trailer-park poor who couldn’t afford to repay them. They then sliced, diced and packaged them into “collateral debt obligations” and sold these to banks around the world.

Now banks don’t trust other banks — or their own balance sheets — so lending short-term funds to other financial institutions is at a standstill. Result? The world suddenly has an acute shortage of liquidity.

The U.S. used to be good at banking. What happened?

If you want to begin to understand the way Google is reconfiguring its pack of algorithms — much to the despair of its smaller commercial customers — you could do a lot worse than read I, Cringley’s latest article on PBS. It portrays the Mountain View operation as a giant can of worms.

[A] problem at Google right now is algorithmic optimization gone mad with the probable result that many of Google’s smaller AdWords customers will go broke this Christmas. Killing longtime customers is not a good corporate policy.

The upshot seems to be that Google is subject to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences, a well-known byproduct of increasing complexity. Worse, Google does not address these problems directly for fear of crashing its already wobbly customer service system. Now there’s a real bind.

We’re used to governments getting into hot waters like this, but they are operated by rather stupid people. Google is run by whizz kids with Stanford PhDs and brains the size of a minor moon of Jupiter.

What’s really going on here? “Algorithms — the smarter the better — are at the heart of Google’s success. But Google’s major failing nearly always comes down to confusing algorithmic efficiency with moral, ethical, or even business correctness. Sometimes good algorithms do bad things and the tendency at Google is to simply not care: it was the ALGORITHM’s fault.”

I’ve always suspected that Algy the Algorithm was a thoroughly nasty cartoon character. Like all such characters, he’s completely indestructible. Even if you flatten him to the floor he just pops up again worse than ever.

As Cringely puts it : “… recently Google started messing with AdWords, modifying algorithms and launching new programs that make the company look good to Wall Street, which is always seeking at least the appearance of improvement, but not to Google’s AdWords customers.”

At $700 a share it may be easy to break with its original customer base, but with the U.S. and world economies going sharply south, even Google may need the support of anyone it can get … maybe even those small-scale, under-capitalized guys who built their businesses alongside its growing infrastructure.

I’ve been writing about my interest in the economics of the retail sector for a year without very much happening. Now the long-gestated project is beginning to come to life thanks to our contacts with a number of specialist retail analysts.

One of the reasons I moved into the content business online was because of a long-term plan to create specialist information products for high-worth niches, published privately or behind subscription walls.

The idea goes back to my initial training in information science at the Central Office of Information in London. The COI is part of the Foreign Office, for which I also produced specialist information packages for Britain’s Embassies abroad. These were mainly product and technology based.

Now, working with a small team of retail analysts, we’ve hatched the first of these new projects aimed at large retail corporations. The project will have its own corporality separate from Syntagma Media, which will own a share of the business.

Given Google’s sudden froideur towards digital networks, this will provide much-needed diversification away from our reliance on Google traffic and rankings.

The retail product will be followed by others of a similar nature. They won’t be visible to a general audience, although some of the knowledge-base may trickle down into Syntagma sites.

The quality of the product is everything, of course. High-worth clients are not going to pay real money for information generally available in the press. Expertise and relevance are essential. I believe our team has that, and coupled with Syntagma’s in-house information skills, the result will be a killer product for the industry.

Year 3 of the Syntagma odyssey begins with a bang.

You always knew it would.