Sundays are usually “put your hands up time” where I come from. In other words, a time to fess up to your faults. #

So here goes. I have an addiction. A serious addiction. It causes me no end of problems and sweaty-palmed angst. I am addicted to …

Techmeme! #

Like many a tech-oriented internet user, I find Gabe Rivera’s almost-perfect creation irresistible. There are times when it seems to be the centre of the universe, with huge galaxies and bright stars spinning off in vast numbers from this fiery firmament of knowledge and innovation. Heck, Syntagma is quite often in there too.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit to get your attention. Because there are also times — increasingly so — when a blanket of gloom settles over me as I trundle through the familiar stories on shiny new applications and hardware which deliver to the user the tiniest smidgeon of improvement over their current expensively-procured setup. And the orgasmic excitement over the tweeniest fall from grace, or the most overblown prediction, has to be experienced to be believed.

I was glad, therefore, to wake up this Sunday morning to a cool blast of common sense by Dave Winer. Spinning off a New York Times article about Silicon Valley, he pens the following :

“The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough. … You can’t find security through money, because security is impossible. We die. Deal with it.”

The reason that hit home to me is that it’s what I’ve been doing all this year. Pulling back from the mesmeric allure of the “blog network industry” dream which promises that the creation of mediocre content online can produce an eight-figure fortune in a couple of years or so.

I’ve written about my disillusionment on that score many times here, and also on the alternative of simply running a relaxed, quality content business for fun and a decent, regular income. In turn, this creates time to operate in the real world as a hedge play and a grounding exercise.

Either way, Silicon Valley is for obsessives who continue to believe the Faustian deal with venture capital is the path to enduring happiness.

To paraphrase that old IRA man, Gerry Adams : Mephistopheles hasn’t gone away, you know.

Syntagma was recently 78,000 on Alexa — not a bad score given the number of sites out there.

Then, inexplicably, it started to rise. Up to 180,000.

Since I’ve switched to a Windows Vista machine with no Alexa toolbar it’s gone up to 325,282. Can this be my own doing for not supporting the number every time I go to the site?

No, Alexa is rubbish. Our traffic has risen enormously in the very months it’s gone from 78,000 to 325,000.

Why do we bother quoting these useless statistics?

The Syntagma Story continued.

The word you most hear in connection with blogging is “passion”. Write about what you’re passionate about, is the general counsel given to new bloggers. Is that good advice? It’s now so engrained in the folklore of professional blogging as to be almost unchallengable.

I’m going to be counter-intuitive about this because, as a network owner of nearly two years standing, I’ve learnt a thing or two about passion. I’ve also found that situations aren’t always what they seem.

If you’re passionate about something, say, cats or Minoan amphora, you really have to be more than just knowledgeable about them. You must also be a very good writer — someone who can express the full depth and breadth of your ideas and well-stocked mind and carry them intact into other people’s consciousness.

Alas, very few are. Most are people who fizz for a while, then burn out when their efforts come to nothing. I call them Catherine Wheels.

At the commercial network level, bloggers who apply for jobs do want to make money. Why else would they apply? On the other hand, they also want to write about what interests them, and are often encouraged to do that.

How many times have I heard, “I want to write about Etruscan architecture” or some such niche. “Do you want to make money?”, say I, in my usual mercenary way. “Well, I don’t want to sell my soul, if that’s what you mean”, they reply. “But,” say I, “do you want to make money?”

Of course, they do, but they don’t want to admit it as baldly as that.

Almost all newbie bloggers are schizoid by nature. They really, really, really want to earn money, but they also want to preserve “the integrity of their art”. I usually remind them that William Shakespeare was constantly being chased for debt and even defaulted on his tax payments.

Of course, you can use a blog as a stage to perform on — if you are your own product. Selling yourself is a good way to use weblog software. But most blog writers want to earn cash from the act of writing the blog itself, and that requires focus, not passion or self-indulgent choices of subject matter.

Take books as an example. Books are one of my own passions. I’ve tried writing about them online and selling them on affiliate terms with Amazon and others. It just doesn’t work. Local stores will undercut you on the bestsellers — supermarkets now offer huge discounts — and long tail stuff is too thin a gruel to live on.

Just reading a book to review takes a minimum of three hours. How many can you do in a working day? Not more than one realistically. So passion is not enough.

Unfocused bloggers need to ask themselves three questions :

1. Do I want to spend a lot of time writing about my fave subject irrespective of whether it makes money or not?

If the answer is Yes, then they don’t belong in the commercial sector.

2. Can I become a thought leader in a monetizable and lucrative niche?

Assuming the answer is No, go to question 3 — because a network can’t gamble on someone turning into an Om Malik or Michael Arrington :

3. How can I make money from the work I intend to put into writing online?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

This is the point at which a rookie become marketable and usable for a commercial network.

Although we’ve had many site failures at Syntagma Media — and author failures too — we have turned round a lot of failing sites — and authors — by changing the emphasis, usually in the direction of big-ticket products and services, or high-end reportage and commentary.

Like everything else, it’s about professionalism and focus. The passionate, unfocused blogger is not a useful factor in a successful operation. Mainstream media use authoritative and reassuring voices in their presentation. That’s not accidental.

Passion would be so out of place.

Suddenly, there’s a raft of blog posts pointing out changes in the blogosphere caused by its dumb lovechild, social networking. Some bloggers are even heading for the exit. Here’s a quick roundup :

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void make this interesting point about thought leadership, one of the traditional drivers of the tertiary blogosphere : “Suddenly, social networks start being successfully created without the ‘A-Listers’ having to act like ‘Hubs’ [or 'Human Social Objects', if you want to get REALLY technical]. Suddenly, the need for A-listers to arbitrate ‘Who the Cool Kids are’ [and who they aren't] is rapidly and thankfully diminished.!”

Robert Scoble has a go too : “One trend that bloggers don’t want to talk about? A number of my blogging friends have seen their traffic go down lately. They assume that their readers are off in social networks. I think they are absolutely right.”

So traffic is moving from relatively coherent writerly patterns to the kind of bullet point messages we used to send in telegrams.

Rex Hammock highlights the dumb-down effect of social networking : “When you set up a Facebook account, you’re not weighted down with the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit or whatever it is that keeps most people from setting up a blog.”

Goddam those writers, publishers and pundits! What do they know? Let’s all babble together!

David Jaffe, a games designer and blogger sighs : “I’m going to go dark. … For me, it’s always been silly, stupid fun…you know, giving what I get, talking like alot of folks on geeky message boards do, trash talking, etc.”

Is this a trend? Well, I’ve been writing this stuff for ages here on Syntagma — which ceased being a blog yonks since.

The catalyst for all this angst, of course, is the unstoppable rush to social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and now Pownce. Geeks genuinely feel they have to keep up with this trend or they’ll be left stranded behind the curve. Kids just have to do it or get confined to social outer darkness. All this crosses over the endless debates about “new media” (I prefer “popular media”) and the mainstream media, the future of newsprint … etcetera.

Personally, I’ve always thought that the medium matters less than we suppose, assuming it doesn’t carry some self-limiting factor, like 140-character max output range, in which case it’s unfit for most purposes.

For example, some newspapers incorporate an occasional poetry spot, where decent poets can publish their verses. Does that make the poet a journalist? If writers use blog platforms to publish the kind of article that could easily appear in a broadsheet paper or specialist magazine, does that make them bloggers?

The medium isn’t the message, the quality and form of the writing, or broadcasting is. Good reportage is just that, wherever it appears. So is commentary. So is any other form of expression. We’ve been confusing the medium with the message for too long — since Marshall Mcluhan in fact.

Nowadays, shopping lists, quick notes, annotations, reminders, and so on are rapidly becoming the discourse of choice in the online world. Even A-Listers are getting dragged into it. Coherence is losing out to the babble of Babel. Quality to quantity.

Rex Hammock talks of “the responsibility of being a publisher or writer or pundit …” Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The idea that everyone has a novel in them, or could be a published author, was never a runner. In any originative profession, only 5 percent of aspiring entrants ever truly succeed. Some bloggers use their blogs as their identity, promoting consultancy work or their offline writing.

What particularly interests me is online content production. We shouldn’t confuse this with instant messaging, which is what the social networks are doing. You don’t IM an op-ed on world economic prospects.

Content production is done for two reasons :

1. As hobby, amateur production, fun.
2. As a professional activity aimed at financial returns.

People often start out as #1 practitioners then, if they think they’re good enough, they might move on to #2.

That’s where most of the people engaged in this debate are. They are pros in an increasingly amateurish media space. That’s why there are now dozens of books getting into print, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Andrew Keen’s tirade against the negative effects of popular media, The Cult of the Amateur.

The way to survive all this hype and arm-twisting is The Low Information Diet, severely limiting your consumption of news and gibberish, and concentrating ferociously on what matters to you. If it’s income you’re after, productivity and targeting are the keynotes of performance.

It’s true, though, that most of us like to sound off about this and that — join the “conversation”, as it’s called. But the conversation is largely spurious unless you’re doing it for genuine economic or social reasons, in which latter case you’d be better off in the real world.

If you’re an originative intellectual worker on the internet, discipline and focus are the watchwords. Anything else is professional suicide.