I want to thank everyone who has responded to our Christmas/Holidays advertising post so far.

To say we were inundated would be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. Read the post here : #

Remember, on average it takes seven sightings of an ad for it to register sufficiently to sell goods or services. So it’s in every business’s interests to begin their Holidays advertising early.

In our local town there are already people on the streets with Santa hats on, handing out flyers. I know that’s boring when it still feels like summer, but it’s a shrewd response to human nature.

Think about it.

Your contact : ads(AT)SyntagmaMedia(DOT)com.

In developing my forthcoming book, Superdemocracy — The New Art of Corporate Governance, I’ve been looking closely at the dream of synergy and the reality of particularity. #

All mergers and acquisitions are based on the idea that economies of scale will drive down costs across the board and produce synergies between organizations. This assumption is so ingrained in our thinking that few people stop to ask why most takeovers fail.

In any group activity there’s a hierarchy of decisionmaking. Each person in the structure gets a bagload of responsibilities based on various assumptions, and the empire-building of their predecessors. Like cream in a milk bottle, decisions have a strong tendency to rise up the hierarchy, stopping only when the number of assumptions needed to take them exceeds common sense.

Notice the word “exceeds”. This isn’t a rational process, it’s pushed purely by ego and vanity.

The result is that most decisions in any organization (business or governmental) produce a one-size-fits-all outcome which gives a false sense of synergy, while destroying efficiency and particularity.

“Particularity” may sound odd here but, in reality, it’s the crux of the well-being of any complex infrastructure. It means decisions are made with few assumptions and with a “size”, or scale, that fits the need of every case.

Modern Western countries are one-size-fits-all societies. It’s our weakest link and the point where our enemies concentrate their attacks. They know most decisions, whether laws, regulations, red tape, whatever, are unpopular and largely unworkable, because they lack particularity.

Thus we need armies of lawyers to sort things out, over long periods of time. We also have to throw huge amounts of national and business capital at problems just to keep them afloat.

Politburo orders are always wrong. EU “directives” are never right for most people. Decisions taken on 10 Downing Street’s sofa have been proved disastrous time and again. White House decisions are hardly spangled with success. Microsoft, and even lucky Google, make crass moves all the time which go totally pear-shaped.

If every decision were taken at the point of maximum competence, or very near to it, there would be few assumptions to make, and the outcome would be as close to perfect as it’s possible to reach.

So here’s The Superdemocracy Principle : Particularity means never having to make assumptions. If you’re making assumptions, the decision shouldn’t be taken at your pay grade.

The word “blog” and its derivatives “blogger” and “blogging” must be the most commonly used words in the blogosphere. You simply can’t get away from them. Some bloggers use them in every other sentence — at least.

For me, each time I read one of them in a blog, it’s like a very large cow pat falling from the sky in front of me. Bloggers [splat] who give a running commentary on their blogs [splat] and their blogging [splat] and then do the same for other bloggers [splat] and their blogs [splat] really need to get away from their blogs [splat] more.

The whole subject of blogs, bloggers and blogging [splat, splat, splat] has been obsessed to death on the internet. Even if you use asterixes you can’t escape : as in bl*gs, bl*ggers and bl*gging [spl*t, spl*t, spl*t].

Don’t get me wrong, I love the art and freedom of ******** [*****], but I just don’t want to see that word again in case one day a cow pat lands on my head [splat].

Warning : This is totally off-topic and is inspired by yesterday’s news of the rapidly disintegrating state of the British Home Office under Tony Blair’s pitiful administration.

It’s not a rant though. Promise. Just a look at the Panglossian fantasies that drive British policy nowadays : “Everything for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.

Here’s a first glimpse of the new Syntagma Media corporate logo (proposed).

The Intergalactic Council has a few more to consider, but this is the one I like. Why? Because I designed it.

This means, of course, that all fans of my design style will love it, but the other 99.9% will hate it. But you can’t have everything.

Comments?

Update: Thord has countered with one of his own. I wonder what the Intergalactic Council will make of this :

Syntagma Media has now firmed up plans for two new network magazines, both dedicated to the retail market and advertising. They are:

ShopShape UK
Retailz USA

Both will cover a number of new Wordpress websites on all aspects of retail therapeutics, like upmarket shirts, fine wines, and luxury travel goods.

The first to go up will be Royal Marriage, a site dedicated to the upcoming Royal wedding between future King, Prince William, and Kate Middleton (see our site Royal Anecdotes for current coverage).

We will, for the first time be accepting applications from external websites (blog software based) to be included in these publications.

That’s a question often asked and served with a multitude of answers. So here’s mine.

The blogosphere is a swamp.

Now before you rush off in a rage and write hysterical articles about me, let me explain my point. Swamps are superb.

Out of the primeval swamp, we’re told, came all of life as we know it. The original Globigerina Ooze was the finest soup ever made because it contained all the ingredients to manufacture lifeforms. Hence my presence at the keyboard and yours reading this piece.

The blogosphere is a swamp. It’s a glorious seeding ground for phenomenally innovative ideas, both in thought and in action.

It also acts as a proving ground for new ideas, products and services, where they can be poked over by all manner of experts, dumbos and interested parties.

However, once the idea is pronounced “good”, what next? Clearly it can stick around and play the Blogosphere’s Game of tilting at windmills, baiting others for traffic, and monetizing to cover the bill at Starbucks or the Cafe Royal.

Blog networks are something excellent that emerged from the blogosphere and, with Weblogs Inc, powered out of it to glory.

And there’s the rub. Like the young of all species, the blogosphere’s best has to fly the nest if they are to make it in the big, wide world of grownups.

Blog networks have to drop the blog label if they are to attract a much larger clientelle and flourish in the commercial sphere.

Gadget blogs may well be an exception to this rule, because they automatically appeal to millions of techie gadget-fanciers, who may not be bloggers at all.

But for a network that seeks a broader commercial role than the Blogosphere Game permits, leaving is essential.

That doesn’t mean you can’t write home occasionally, even visit the old folks. It just means you have to make your valedictory speech and precipitate yourself over the side of the nest.

That’s where Syntagma Media is now. I suspect other networks are similarly placed. Tech people will find it hard to make the break. Publishers and authors like myself will find it much more congenial, especially when the slurp of the swamp orchestrates their departure.

So, blog bog-folk, wish us well. We’re going into the wide blue yonder where windmills are called turbines and serve a useful purpose. It was good knowing you and I hope your seedbed produces many more good ideas, like blogs and blog networks.

You can still read us here, but our voice may sound more distant than hitherto. Ciaou and mind how you go.

I wasn’t going to comment on the weird case of Steve Irwin and his almost self-willed death, but this event is so typical of our over-sentimentalized, fawning society that I had to do a small piece over on Celebrity at Work :

“In scenes reminiscent of the passing of Princess Diana, people who never met him are congregating besides walls of flowers, their faces contorted with anguish. John Howard, the normally sensible Prime Minister, has even offered a state funeral. Thankfully, Irwin’s father has declined ‘because he was just an ordinary bloke’.”

This kind of emotional contagion is easily spread by technologies like global television and the blogosphere, which has also been contaminated by this surge of unprovoked grief. The only sane voice seems to be to be Irwin’s father. Australia would do well to consider him as their next Prime Minister.

Read Steve Irwin – Hero or Suicide?.

It’s a well-known fact that “Web 2.0″ design fads — the smoothly-refreshing AJAX, the ease of syndication, and those maddening widgets drowning in OPML — seriously reduce page views.

Since advertising is mostly sold on page views, it follows that commercial websites should avoid the latest pointy hairdos (figuratively speaking).

Evan Williams discusses the problems of page views and other metrics in a wide-ranging article that’s been much commented on. Here’s a snippet from it that caught my ever-watchful eye :

“… part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.”

Say no more, Evan.

I much prefer Chris Pearson’s idea of Information Architecture to snazzy effects, and simple utility to “design”.