Our end of year review+fix of the Syntgama network is now almost complete.

We’ve stabilized to 27 active sites, down from 55 at peak, with 9 archived. That includes three new sites : Sideways Health (now purring along quite healthily), a new role for Moneyizor, involving the topic of the moment : macroeconomics (should be relaunching very soon), and the first site of a local West Country of England sub-network, Devon and Cornwall (coming in a week or so).

Underneath all this runs our Specialist Information Online strand, which is not public but deals directly with corporate clients.

Economic conditions are, as the saying goes, falling off a cliff now. When the money men start fleeing their markets you know there’s a war on. And boy have we got a war!

Syntagma’s notorious prudence over money matters is paying off now with cash reserves to see us through the crunchy times ahead and zero borrowings or obligations of any sort.

Marshall Sponder, our man in NYC, has been writing about all the businesses shutting up shop in New York over at Art NYC. It’s quite a bloodbath by the sound of it.

Here in the UK the blows are only just beginning to land, but they’re coming thick and fast now. People with fixed-term mortgages are trapped like rats in a sack. Nowhere to go. Three million families are already moving into negative equity. Dangerous times.

Still, the show must go on, and Syntagma’s sails are furled ready for the perfect storm. (Note to self : I must stop mixing these metaphors!).

There’s always a silver lining, though. When asset prices fall some great business opportunities arise for those with the cash to buy them. No wonder economics is called the dismal science.

Syntagma never says “I told you so”. It’s an irritating phrase that adds nothing to a debate. It’s also a pyrrhic victory when the bad times roll.

We’re talking about the American economy, of course — now in recession, as we’ve been predicting for months — and the British and European financial positions, which are trailing some way behind the U.S., but about to implode too.

We’ve been on the case since last June when the ominous tag “credit crunch” started to be bandied about in response to falling American house prices.

As online publishers we are partially protected from the ravages faced by bricks and mortar operations. Even so, Google responded to the same data last year by dumping lots of small publishers using its AdWords/AdSense programs and its range of offshoot partnerships.

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan believes that “the dip in Google’s paid clicks was intentional, part of a strategic plan designed to deliver better, more-precisely targeted ads” and tends “to reflect macroeconomic conditions” — an acknowledgment that suggests Google isn’t recession-proof.

The knock-on effects lowered the earning power of a whole raft of mid-sized publishers who operate below the glass ceiling of scalability needed to challenge the giant press barons of the print media.

Given the power of this pincer movement, how should internet marketers and publishers ride out the troubles ahead, which may even include another dotcom crash?

Here at Syntagma we are developing two new business models which don’t depend exclusively on Google rankings and big investment in assets. We have also moved to conserve cash, now the most sought after commodity in global financial markets. Forget equities, bonds and angel lending. Asset-backing is truly out of fashion. Only cash and gold will do during the next two to five years, or maybe even longer than that. Japan took more than a decade to haul itself out of its banking crisis and the profound deflation of the 1990s.

I really don’t see how mid-sized businesses, with heavy debt, and/or lots of equity in the hands of VCs, can get through this otherwise.

The Fed’s dramatic easing of monetary policy, which still has some way to go, is barely making an impact, although the usual lags apply. In the 1990s, Japan found that zero, even negative, interest rates could not persuade its reluctant public to splash out in the shops. Longer term rates in the U.S. are already close to zero.

Ben Bernanke is apparently studying the Japanese experience of zero rates right now. Surely a sign of what’s to come.

The game now appears to be out of the hands of the authorities whatever they decide to do. Bernanke deserves credit for at least trying. His next move will surely be to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and let the Devil take the hindmost. This is no time for musings on “moral hazard”, the hazard is not inflation but deflation and slump. Massive U.S. Government loans to individual defaulters can’t be ruled out and may be just around the corner.

Compare that to the lethargic approach of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. Still holding rates at 5.25 percent and 4 percent respectively, although the BoE has little room to manoeuvre thanks to Gordon Brown’s obsession with public-sector spending.

The first casualties could be some major institutions in America and monetary union in Europe, where the euro currency is looking very vulnerable. At least Brown got that right.

Syntagma predicts we are going to be amazed by developments in the not too distant future. The world may look a very different place when we come out of this, and it won’t necessarily be all bad news. Bubbles have to burst. Nature demands it. And the end of the eurozone would be a big plus for European freedom.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a post called These are the good times. They were and still are, uncomfortable though the ride may be.

In recent months seventeen teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling the nation.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers. Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

You know you’ve made it when the competition walks in terror of your objectives.

Attila the Hun as depicted by the BBC

If you generate real fear in your space, you’ve achieved the status of Attila the Hun, who terrorized the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

Who is the 21st century’s online version of the bloodthirsty Hun? Google, of course : the “Do no evil” search giant which can be surprisingly heavy-handed in defence of its own interests.

Microsoft has clearly given up on its solitary attempts to challenge the unchallengable, and has been seeking to swallow other stragglers to redress the position.

It should heed the old warning, though : “You are what you eat”.

Yahoo is refusing the toothsome embrace of the software king and is now in talks with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but escaping the clutches of one Great White Shark only to fall longingly into the jaws of another, doesn’t seem like a very good strategy to me. But what do I know?

The two sides are apparently in discussions about merging MySpace and News Corporation’s other online properties with Yahoo. News Corp would get a stake of more than 20pc in the internet company.

The deal would help the Murdoch corporation fight back against the growing dominance of Google’s internet search business. There’s that name again.

Last year, Rupert Murdoch said: “We’ve got to find new ways and new business models to get revenues. Or else the world is going to be owned by Google.”

He has made no secret of the fact that he views attacking Google’s dominance as the key to internet progress for his businesses.

The deal would also leave Microsoft without a growth strategy. The Redmond softies have been desperately trying to make their mark in the online world after seeing their software and operating systems business deliver little value to shareholders in recent years.

A News Corp-owned Yahoo would give Murdoch an established news platform online and, under the terms being discussed, would leave Yahoo essentially independent to take the fight to both Google and Microsoft.

Somehow, I see Google surviving that, but Microsoft may have nowhere to hide — online at least.

The Wall Street Journal — now Murdoch owned — is calling the value of MySpace at between $6bn and $10bn. A spokeswoman for Yahoo said last night, “Our board is continuing to carefully and thoroughly evaluate its strategic options and is committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders.”

One can’t help thinking that somewhere in the background, watching like a hawk, is the wily Attila. This time though he’s running out of options. Anti-Trust laws are likely to limit Google’s room for manoeuvre.

Attila was finally caught up with and defeated by a superior Roman General leading a coalition of tribes pushed aside by the Hun. They included Saxons, Franks and Celts.

Are sufficient forces now gathering that will see off the internet’s own version of Attila?

Maybe not this time. But fall he will. History is implacable on that.