“It’s with a heavy heart, and much consideration, that today I would like to announce my retirement from blogging.”
Jason McCabe Calacanis

Hold the front page? Well, yes, maybe — at least of the Silicon Alley Reporter, the U.S. trade magazine he founded.

Jason Calacanis is more widely known as the man who sold a network of blogs for around $30m to AOL a few years back. He is one of Web 2.0’s highest flyers in the sense that he turned big thoughts into big bucks. He now runs his own hand-rolled search engine, Maholo.

His resignation “post” (as purists still call them) is worthy of Victorian melodrama, leading to charges of link-baiting — a common way of driving traffic to blogs. Naturally, he denies this, claiming never to have soiled his hands with such practices. Perish the thought.

He will, he says, replace his blogging activities with a private email list comprising roughly 1000 subscribers, all drawn from a group he calls “insiders”. These are intelligent, tech and business types of the kind most often found in Silicon Valley, California. So if you’re an Albanian circus performer with limited English, don’t bother to apply.

Why this move, and why now? Obvious answers include:

1. blogging has had its day.
2. attention spans are getting shorter, hence Twitter.
3. good bloggers often work as hard as journalists for little pay.
4. blogging has failed to build a reputation for quality.
5. spam comments have brought the system to its knees.
6. blog comments have let in demons from the outer darkness.

And there are many more reasons than those.

For good writers with something original to say, blogging has become a downward-leveller, rather than an enabler, as originally intended by weblog pioneers like Dave Winer. If you are a serious blogger, most readers will assume your opinions are prejudices, and ranting your principal method of communication. Otherwise, why don’t you write for The Guardian or Scientific American?

Commenters will lead you to believe the worst of the human race, which is why the traffic lights at the top of this site read “Comments OFF, Email ON.” Signs like this are becoming more prevalent around the “blogosphere” as people start to audit their return on capital from blogging.

The email list system is more like a private forum in which selected subscribers discuss topics in a “thread,” in this case the leader of the group’s weekly email. As a method of publishing to a coterie of like-minded individuals who are able to develop the arguments and refine them in a civilized fashion, the list has much to commend it. It’s also very cheap — no paper, printing and postage costs, or time-overhead batting away the daft, stupid, nasty and positively evil intruders.

For an author writing a nonfiction book with closely-argued chapters, it would be an excellent way of fact-checking the material and the logic of its presentation bit by bit, without having to submit it to academic specialists for verification before publishing.

In Jason Calacanis’s case, I would suspect he just wants to express himself in writing without all the hassle from trolls and oddballs.

In the end, the wisdom of crowds is no such thing because the most reckless, outspoken elements inevitably rise to leadership positions, drowning out more measured voices.

Meritocracy — the spirit of excellence, with decisions taken at points of maximum competence — always needs nurturing in cell-like establishments.

Let’s face it, the world is too big for any one individual to make much of an impact without vast wealth or political power. The blogosphere has become so enormous, comprised of multitudes of tiny, discrete pieces that it takes on the laws of quantum physics rather than the world of direct contact with our peers that humans crave.

There’s no worse tragedy than to have communicated widely for years only to discover that the throng out there still doesn’t know what you’ve been talking about.

There’s quite a bit of chatter around about comments being separated from blog posts by various network services. Somehow this is said to diminish blogs as a folkish artform. Does that matter?

The 21st-century internet is the stuff of Quantum Mechanics. Everything is possible without limit, whatever we may think about the outcome. The Web is a vast array of small atoms, not large planets. Its laws are closer to magic than physics and can be said to exist only within the context of human thought.

Leaving that inevitability aside because we can’t influence it, I believe we should be more worried about small concerns in small cases.

A couple of months ago there was an explosion of comments on Twitter about the way an interview was conducted with a founder of Facebook by a hapless BusinessWeek reporter, who was deemed not to have done a great job. To read some A-list bloggers, you’d think Jesus had been crucified all over again.

The poor woman concerned must have felt the stigmata piercing her extremities.

As I commented on one blog, “If this is what passes for REALLY BIG NEWS on Twitter, God help us all.”

It’s the old, old story of mass hysteria breaking out on what seems to be the big question of the moment. If you don’t get involved, you’re somehow not quite alive. Even people not in the interview audience were screaming blue murder — apparently.

Now, I’m not going to have another go at Twitter. I actually admire Evan Williams and his business ethos. He deserves to succeed and he has many supporters.

I just wish the “wisdom of the crowd” was not being compressed into a few self-appointed Black Holes around various insignificant 1960s-style “happenings”.

We need the crowd to defeat tyrants, not to tyrannize ordinary folk just doing their jobs, no matter how awkwardly.

Here ends the sermon on no particular mount.

The New York Times has a rather gloomy piece on how bloggers are dropping dead like flies, apparently overcome by the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

Personally, I’ve not known a blogger who has slumped lifeless over a keyboard (touch wood). I imagine people pass away at inconvenient moments in many professions. Blogging and writing from home must have its share of dicky tickers like any other walk of life.

However, the NYT has chapter and verse :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

From these few examples you would have to subtract the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment. However, a word of caution. Anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms. Journalists are not notorious for their alcohol consumption for nothing.

And try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

Methinks the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote a day or two ago.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

Syntagma’s advice : drop the Tweets, do the paid work efficiently — a three-hour morning should suffice — then get out of the house on a long Photowalk, or maybe to the golf course or coffee shop (preferably without a Hotspot), and forget about the Labours of Hercules. He was a mythical character and is not one to emulate.

This morning I received a couple of comments on two old posts dating back to October 2005 and July 2006. Both posts have been popular for comments and email conversations. Neither is on topic — which are, Tech, Media, Publishing — and would fall into the very ample category of self-indulgence.

The first is, Hey, I’m a Viking, which tells how I discovered that I’m … erm … a Viking. It seems I have the genetic configuration called Baron Dupuytren’s disease, or Viking Finger. Here’s a snippet :

“This weekend I discovered I’m a Viking. … Yes, I’m one of those horn-headed, axe-wielding types who terrorized Europe for centuries. Before you run for cover, I’m not about to go on a spreadeagling spree or demand you pay me Danegeld — although that might not be a bad idea.

“I realized I’ve got Viking blood — as many in the British Isles have — because of a minor medical condition which affects the small finger tendon in the palm of a hand. This progressive condition pulls the small finger gradually across the palm, giving a rather gnarled, even romantic, impression to the onlooker. The figure of Captain Hook springs to mind. ”

The second, is about an obscure Cornish author called Crosbie Garstin, now utterly forgotten, even in Cornwall. Yet, he wrote a major Hollywood film, China Seas (1935), which starred Clark Gable, plus a memorable trilogy about the Penhales family. Here’s a taster :

“Crosbie Garstin is best known for his trilogy of novels about the Penhales family, published before the last war by Heinemann. The Owls’ House, High Noon and The West Wind are all cracking adventures set in Cornwall and on the high seas in the days of sail. China Seas, his last book, continued the genre, and was made into a Hollywood film starring Clark Gable. Garstin was an interesting character, a true adventurer and traveller. He served during the first world war in King Edward’s Horse and was commissioned on the battlefield in 1915.”

It always intrigues me why some posts attract comments long after they were published. Clearly, these two contain specific keywords that are regularly searched for on Google and other engines. Syntagma is number 1 on Google for both “crosbie garstin” and “viking finger”.

So doctors searching for medical information on Baron Dupuytren’s disease will land on our silly post. Let’s hope they don’t kill anyone with an axe.