The Blog Herald is chatting about Syntagma Media in its weekly podcast. I haven’t had the chance to listen to it yet, so I hope I’m not driving you into the flames.

It seems they’re discussing our decision to reposition the network as a Web Network Magazine rather than a blog network. Of course, as a business exclusively aimed at blogging, BlogMedia (owner of The Blog Herald) is defending its patch. Our move must seem like apostasy to them.

The problem lies not with the blogosphere itself (it’s amazing) but that once you get into the commercial side of it, you find that “blogging” is not associated in the wider public’s mind with “shopping” or even “finding accurate, in-depth information”.

We’re aiming for this wider audience. Bloggers rarely click on ads — that’s a truism. People searching on products and services, on the other hand, do. It’s as simple as that. We’re now a business, not a blog; a media operation, not individuals shouting to get a word in edgeways.

As I posted under Are there three blogospheres? there are areas where the blogosphere shades into mainstream media. It happens at the fringes of the tertiary and commercial blogospheres. Syntagma is positioning itself there to draw in a wider audience.

We are a business, and we will continue pushing the envelope as we go. The “blogosphere” can easily become your jailer if you allow it to mask all other opportunities.

When Weblogs Inc closes down a blog on a specific topic, you know something’s going pear-shaped in that particular field.

WIN has announced that its Digital Photography blog has been “retired”, though apparently not yet placed in its home for golden agers.

We too have had trouble finding effective authors for our Digital Camera Latest site, which will continue on a shared arrangement after Labor Day in the States.

By contrast, Darren Rowse’s prolific Digital Photography School continues to make waves, even meriting an article in the Wall Street Journal. What are we to make of this?

Coincidentally, it’s on Darren’s Problogger site that Jason Calacanis explains the move in the comments on the post: “Even the Big Boys Call it Quits”.

WIN is consolidating its blogs because :

a) the big ones are sold out on advertising and need more inventory
b) the small ones are having a hard time becoming money makers for us because advertisers want blogs with > 1M pages a month.

They want to focus on the big winners that advertisers can’t get enough of — not just Engadget, but also Autoblog and others, those in the range 500k to 3m pages a month. The aim is get them to 5m pages/month when they will start to mop up a lot of incoming deals that have no place to go at present.

“Bottom line: we are in phase two at WIN, and phase two is about scale. We knnow we can make money, the question is can we scale this business to a LOT of money. Like move the needle at AOL money–and we’re on the way.”

If these numbers seem out of reach of smaller operators that’s because WIN is now part of AOL and draws traffic from a global media conglomerate. I don’t think those of us who have yet to achieve that massive advantage should throw in the towel in despair.

But despite the different league these stats come from, there’s a lot of good sense in the principles used. Consolidation is a good way to add strength cheaply to promising mid-range blogs.

Where acquisitions will cost you money, consolidation can save you money while at the same time boosting mid-performers into that magic >1m PVs range which expands your saleable inventory to a different kind of advertiser.

Here at Syntagma, in our tenth month of operation, we’re growing our page views at around 300pc a year, and that rate is accelerating. We’re happy with that — few businesses get that kind of growth. But Jason’s words on consolidation will be top of the agenda next time we consider the road ahead.

In an intriguing media experiment, The Washington Post is offering to sell advertising space on commercial blogs on a revenue-split basis. Blogs accepted into the beta program will be rotated in a box situated bottom right on the WashingtonPost.com front page. With 8 million readers a month that could be a useful place to be.

Syntagma has thrown in a few blogs to test out the system. However, the designer of the scheme, Jeff Burkett, in a comment on Problogger, has already stated what we all thought : “Not only is pricing going to be a challenge, but the volume of blog submissions has been very high and it is a lot of information to sort through.”

Here’s part of the description of the scheme :

The Sponsored Blogroll is an index on the washingtonpost.com homepage that promotes bloggers who are participating in a partnership with the advertising team of WPNI. If you are a blogger or blog network looking to expand your readership and advertising, our Sponsored Blogroll program can be the boost you’ve been looking for.

Here’s how it works:
A link to members’ blogs will be featured in our Sponsored Blogroll index, giving your writing promotional space on the washingtonpost.com home page and giving you an introduction to an audience of 8 million readers monthly. At the same time, our hardworking sales reps will help connect your signature musings with the huge number of advertisers we deal with every day who are looking for the next big, slightly-outside-the-mainstream idea. …

We are primarily interested in blogs that focus on Technology, Business, Health, Automotive and Travel topics, but welcome submissions on any subject.

It will be interesting to see what kind of advertising results from this. Non-commercial bloggers may have to sharpen up their expertise unless the Post makes it easy for them. Clearly, there’s still a lot of development work needed to make the scheme fly, but all plaudits to Jeff for giving this some wellie.

Many thanks for all the good wishes for our transition from a blog network to a Web Network Magazine. A lot of people have commented, mostly favourably. A few geeks have raised a quizzical eyebrow or two, it’s fair to say.

I’ve been over the process quite a bit, so suffice it to say, Syntagma is looking for a wider audience outside the blogosphere in the territory of mainstream media. That doesn’t mean we’re deserting the predominately tech audience within it. We’re not. We still have three tech blogs and a gadget blog.

Quite a few people have suggested a new “front page” to include RSS headline feeds from the other sites. That’s top of the agenda right now. The tricky part is that RSS feeds are pretty boring. Like pungent spices, they have to be used sparingly.

Some kind of directory on a widened-out page will happen though, but maybe not the “river of news” some people want. Syntagma will still be in a written format, and not a Crewe junction for the network.

That’s all to come in our next fit of creativity — when we’ve recovered from the last one.

Over the hottest part of the summer we’ve been toiling away to effect a complete transformation of Syntagma, from a typical “blog network” to a “continuously updated, online distributed magazine”.

The “distributed” part refers to the “wide” network model we’ve used from the beginning : each topic section being a website with its own individual domain name. We also use the Wordpress weblog technology, but that’s more for convenience than the wish to be bloggers.

The general public sees bloggers as lone voices crying out in the wilderness, usually making a lot of noise in order to be heard. By contrast, when you’re a writer of a distinct topic section of an online magazine, you’re not really a blogger at all, but a …… Well, we’re calling them authors.

The second stage of the reorg was to get rid of the “supplements”, which suggested they were somehow different to the main output instead of just being different “flavours” in the mix. The new “clusters” will add coherence and order to the magazine and enhance reader migration between similar subject areas.

So we now have MetaSyntagma, which collects our mystical sites together. Currently we have Supernatural and Spiritual Nirvana. In September we’ll be launching Arunachala News, a new website providing on-the-spot coverage of life on India’s most mystical mountain : Arunachala. If you’ve heard of Ramana Maharshi I won’t need to say more.

With the return of Money Finesse to the fold, our Money Supplement becomes MoneySyntagma. Creme de la Femme has been dropped because it lacked the leverage we thought it would develop. The success of our art site, Art NYC, however, may encourage us to look at a specific arts cluster : ArtSyntagma at some stage.

Because of the change of emphasis towards a more unified structure, the new clusters won’t need separate editors, as before. We will rely on our authors to provide the editorial input — which many of them do already.

Our newest cluster is iSyntagma, the “i” standing for Indulgences. Here I’ve plonked my personal book blogs, and Naked Tales, a group project which, incidentally, doesn’t have a naked tail in sight, contrary to popular conception. Also our long-term publishing project, Dial Publishing, and my soon-to-be-up Superdemocracy Manifesto, which is more business oriented than political.

The advantage of iSyntagma is that there’s now a place to put suggestions we get for sites dealing with personal agendas, where commercialization would be inappropriate and unwelcome. Believe me, most ideas pitched to me fall into this category, whether the “blogger” knows it or not. The really great ones — mostly by invitation only — will go in there.

So that’s the new structure of UberSyntagma rolling out into the autumn/fall. How far we’ve come from the first stirrings of an idea for a “blog network” which we are now transforming into something acceptable to a wider readership. The objective is to develop a more mainstream platform as we go up a notch or two in the publishing food chain.

A few months ago I wrote a post suggesting that Windows Vista be scrapped in favour of a quarterly update of code and new features: Windows Vista and the Schleswig-Holstein Question.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s IE blog now informs us that its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will be delivered as an automatic update to users of Windows XP.

More interesting still, escapee Robert Scoble is today admitting that Vista won’t be ready until mid-2007 (if then?). He writes : “it doesn’t feel good enough to release to the factory in October. It feels like it needs a good six more months than that, which would mean a mid-year release next year.”

He even gets tough with his old firm : “If this ships in October, I will recommend not installing it and waiting for the first service pack. There’s no way the quality will be high enough to trust it if it ships early. I hope Microsoft takes the time to do this right.”

There’s no doubt Robert is right, so many other facts and opinions point in this direction. It’s time to adopt The Syntagma Solution :

When SP3 (Service Pack 3) ships in late 2006, change the name of Windows XP to Windows 2006-Q4, and run with that every quarter with a new update of any improvements which work. So in March we’ll have Windows 2007-Q1. What could be simpler? Vista would then be dribbled out in bite-sized chunks over time. I recognize some of the big architectural changes may be difficult to roll out, but aren’t they part of the problem, not the solution? Charge us a yearly fee for the upgrades and Microsoft has re-made itself for the 21st century.

Scoble believes we’ll forget all about the delays once a workable Vista arrives. I think he’s being ingenuous. This should have shipped in 2003, had to be rewritten from the ground up in 2004, and let’s say it, may not make 2007. Great chunks of it have already been dropped, including the central feature of a new file storage and access system.

Why is The Syntagma Solution best? Because you’re worth it.

The Royal Yacht Britannia.

Over at Royal Anecdotes, we’ve got a campaign going to bring back the Royal Yacht Britannia. The old ship has been sorely missed, not just by the Queen, but as a symbol of Britain around the world.

If you would like to support this campaign, or just read about it, get along over there now.

Read about the campaign.