There’s been a bit of a hiatus here at Syntagma since the weekend. Our 1.11 recurring posts per day have been conspicuous by their absence.

We’ve been working intensively on Thord’s new design for the network. We’ve just finished the alpha stage and we’re into the beta version this afternoon.

If that works, we’ll be going live here by tomorrow or the weekend.

I must say it’s beginning to look rather splendid — as you would expect from a Thord Hedengren Special. It comes in four templates : one each for sites attached to our three network magazines, plus a neutral version for sites which don’t fit into any one of our mag spots.

We’ll also have new logos following on from the design.

Business leaders, Captains of Industry and advertisers, form an orderly queue, please.

I’ve been following the travails of some blogfreaks who have piled into Wordpress 2.1 while it’s still wet behind the ears. Not a pretty sight (or “site” — either will do).

I’ve also read a few posts on what it contains. Very impressive. But one “improvement” caught my sparrowhawk eye : changes in the table structure of the database which may cause some favourite features to implode.

Call me old fashioned, but it’s that word “implode” which jumps out at me. I’m an old hand at imploding websites, probably having imploded more than the average online tinkerer. One thing I know about implosions — they are virtually impossible to get out of without starting again at the very beginning.

Imploding 50 Wordpress websites is definitely not on my list of priorities.

So the Wordpress team, or community, as open-sourcers prefer to call themselves, can keep their implosions to themselves. Thanks, but no thanks, guys.

All is not totally lost, though. One of the Wordpresseers, Lorelle VanFossen, has compiled a magnificent article on the trials and tribulations of 2.1. It contains enough hard information and instructions to put me off for several lifetimes.

Update : You thought I was going to chicken out, didn’t you? Well, I’ve just updated our test site to Wordpress 2.1 with no problems at all, except that our version of “Subscribe to Comments” doesn’t work. There doesn’t seem to be a problem with the database either, updating from 2.0.5.

I think the problems stated in the articles are for high-tech users who run very sophisticated scripts and plugins. But, for us, no implosions yet, although I can’t get the call to the sidebar to work in the single post template. Any ideas, anyone?

Google PageRank
Jumping quickly back to the Google PR regrade. All of our newer sites now have PR4, and some later ones have regressed to that. The Google dance is still going on, apparently.

However, I’m noticing that many other sites have been pulled back — even The Blog Herald has lost its PR7 and recoils to a 6. There’s clearly something in the new algorithm which penalizes interlinked networks and possibly text link ads too.

As a commercial network, we’ll just have to accept that the Google model index is now downgrading business and blog networks.

You have a choice, it seems : you can have great PR in the poorhouse, or you can earn income with a poor PR.

Take the money and run.

We have been preparing for our ultimate incorporation for some months, pausing only to ensure we have the right balance of elements and sufficient profitability to sustain a much larger operation. However, with our new design currently in hand by Thord Hedengen, it seemed the right moment to declare our new structure, which will be progressively implemented in the second quarter of the year.

Syntagma Media will split into two operating divisions. The first, Syntagma Digital, will contain all our online properties — some 53 websites — including, three network magazines and the (currently) top secret plans codenamed, iSyntagma.

The second new division of Syntagma Media is named Dial Publishing and will handle all print and other offline publishing and consulting work. This side of the business is set to swing into action in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

It always amazes me the amount of work involved in changing even the smallest sliver of a fully-functioning business, so we do this sparingly at all times.

But the time has come to launch : Syntagma Digital.

I’ve been reading on average around two books a week since childhood. I started at age 3 with Enid Blyton novels, rose to Dostoievsky at 13, and have continued ever since. If I live out the average lifetime, though, I will have read only 7,500 books when I enter the pearly gates.

But will St Peter be impressed? If I were the old gatekeeper I’d point out that more that 100,000 new titles are published each year in Britain alone. Add on the rest of the world, and each year’s totals to date, plus the sum of all ancient manuscripts and codices, and you’ll probably arrive at an eight or nine-figure number.

A mere 7,500 is so piffling as to be almost worthless. Strip out the Enid Blyton’s and the Richmal Crompton’s of childhood reading, plus all the other useless tomes and trashy novels read since, and really, old boy, you have virtually no education at all!

I was set to musing on these depressing thoughts after a visit to Waterstones, the biggest bookshop in town yesterday. I was determined to buy a really great book to read over the weekend. After a quick survey of the latest pulp fiction, the newest sensational stuff from the Dan Brown brigade, the huge pile of “Jesus was a Married Martian” nonsense, I passed on with some relief to the non-fiction shelves.

First, history … well, what could possibly be new or fresh in that? Even Andrew Roberts has been reduced to rewriting Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Philosophy, the same — I’d read the latest Roger Scruton, so not much there. Science? Nah … same ole, same ole. Black ole, to be precise.

But technology, surely, must have something new to say? You are joking? All the computer books are way out of date. There was even a large, floppy volume on Microsoft Office 1997 — a bestseller still, apparently.

In the entire bookshop there wasn’t a single title that I hadn’t already flipped through or actually wanted passionately to read. I was bookless in Waterstones.

So despite the woe-begone state of my lifetime’s reading score and my determination to improve it, the world of print publishing couldn’t provide a single instance of something I wanted to read. How crazy is that?

The truth is, there are only so many subject areas you can write a saleable book about. In my years of avid consumption I had apparently exhausted all of them. So, my pifflingly small reading total compared to the billions of titles available is actually much better than old Peter might think. Some shrewd background selectivity has been driving it for years.

I’d obviously extracted the core of human knowledge and speculation and I’m now destined to go round in circles over the same ground for the rest of my days. There must be some Greek god who matches that description.

Where does that leave the content business? It reveals that content, both online and offline, is constantly repeating itself with massive overduplication of material and ideas. Sure, things get shifted round a lot, as in a kaleidoscope, but the central core of all types of content is just a dance of elements trying to present old material as new and original.

Of course, old principles need to be interpreted anew for succeeding generations, but the tidal waves of content we’re now faced with on a daily basis is largely fraudulent.

How often do you get that sinking feeling when viewing your feed reader? Deja vu always overwhelms me when I look at techmeme. Despite being the best snapshot of tech news on the internet, anything but short-term memory reveals the cyclical nature of so-called news.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t read everything. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read 0.01% of everything. Education is choosing what to retain and making sense of it. The other 99.99% recurring is largely superfluous.

From an author’s point of view, the situation is not encouraging. Given the enormous duplication of effort, how much more can content expand, especially on the internet, while retaining value that can be collected by the creator?

We’re already seeing content come close to zero price in many areas. And with copyright laws getting ever looser, newer ways of digging gold from them tha’ mountains of content are urgently needed.

As I write, Valleywag is reporting that “AOL is closing down a slew of smaller blogs it bought from … Jason Calacanis”. Only three WeblogsInc titles are really profitable : Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. The rest are not profitable enough. Nick Denton, the writer of the piece remarks : “I also have an aesthetic aversion to those blog networks which measure success in the quantity of titles rather than the quality of the writing.”

I think we can all agree on that.

We are about to unveil our long-awaited new design for the Syntagma network, following on from the launch of our three network magazine portals late last year.

Thord Hedengren, who designed the portals, is also producing our new network look. The idea is to carry a similarity of design features from portal to site, creating a distinctive Syntagma style. As a network that started out on the Wal-Mart principle of “pile ‘em in ‘n’ stack ‘em high”, this will be a major departure for us.

But then, Petticoat Lane to Bond Street was always our secret trajectory.

We’re getting a draft of the designwork this week, so it shouldn’t be too long before Syntagma joins the fashionistas at the top of the style league.

Watch this spice [sic].

First Impressions

I’ve just taken a look at Daylife, the new, shiny, Ajax-crazy news aggregation service backed by Michael Arrington , Dave Winer and other starry names.

When I first opened it, a very large, black shutter dropped down my screen like an impolite suggestion to get lost. Well, I’m made of sterner stuff and hung on in there … and I’m glad I did. Apart from the soft-soapy Ajax slimyness, this is a very interesting concept, usefully presented.

I haven’t looked at it in depth yet, but it seems to be following the distinct trend back to human intervention, i.e. editors, first picked up by Jason Calacanis at Netscape, but also followed here at Syntagma in our network magazine portals — for example, Allusionz.

Now, Daylife is a big operation and likely to get bigger, especially with the strength of its founding backers. It brings together the traditional magazine news format with cascades of Web technology. It could be the first real internet news purveyor offering a credible alternative to the mainstream offline, especially as it utilizes technology better and offers an API for news presentation on other sites. I believe Huffington Post already takes it.

Once I made some inroads into the strange, but kinda intuitive, navigation, I began to enjoy myself. The stories are good — Egypt and Israel topped the bill when I looked — and there’s lots of backup stories to explore. You can even make a choice of topics that interest you to personalize the presentation.

I’ve yet to get to grips with all of it, so I’m not going to go into detail at this stage, but you can be sure we’ll keep an eye on it.

Investor Michael Arrington has a different point of view, though :

“After quickly reviewing the launch product, I am unhappy to report that I am underwhelmed by what Daylife has to offer. … What makes Daylife stand out is not so much what it does well, but what’s been left out. There are no RSS feeds, … or comments … And the fact that the front page news is gathered by humans, instead of the algorithmically determined news at Digg, means the company will always have a higher cost of doing business.”

This type of newsy site isn’t really suitable for RSS feeds, in my opinion — although they are coming. Try hooking up to the BBC feed and the threads come in batches of 30 or so at a time. Awesomely time-wasting. Feeds don’t always work on galloping aggregation sites unless there are lots of them for narrow niches. Then they become tiresomely complicated.

I think he’s wrong on the editing point too. Another machine-driven aggregation site is not what we need right now. I believe human choice will be a factor in the success of this type of operation in 2007. Online services need to get in touch with their human side if they are ever to match the print world for both quality and friendliness.

The most sensible comment comes from Steve Rubel : “Daylife may not be the most comprehensive news site on the web, but it’s a winner. It aggregates content in a compelling way that is easy to read. That’s something we sorely need in a world of limitless choices. ”

In the end, as ever, it’s not the pundits but the readers who will decide.

Update : There’s some very good discussion on this topic over at Techmeme.

It’s not really a red rag to a bull, more a spinnaker in a field of Spanish fighting bovines. Joseph Rago (note the name) has a total pop at the blogocracy in today’s Wall Street Journal, and boy does he land some heft.

“Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

First into the ring to challenge raging Rago is former heavyweight champ, Duncan Riley, a blog evangelist of some years standing, but now reduced to a small outpost somewhere in Western Australia. I won’t quote Duncan because a lot of it is unprintable in a family publication like Syntagma.

What Rago is doing is to lament the “passing” — or imminent demise — of the words-on-paper publication. He believes the editorial expertise and fact-checking that underpins print media is being shredded by the instantaneous hullaballoo of the blog form.

He’s right on that, of course, but in the process he’s tarring everyone with a large, but broadly insignificant, brush. If anyone wants a considered, fact checked, intelligent opinion on events, they wouldn’t necessarily turn to blogs. They would probably still buy one of the weekly current affairs magazines, or read the op-ed pieces in the Times or indeed, the WSJ, possibly online. But there are blog-like alternatives emerging now.

In the world of “blogs” you can get finely written and expert articles on most topics if you know where to find them. At the higher end, blogs are not like newspapers, they are more like authored, opinion columns in newspapers, where a single, authoritative voice expounds on a topic of the moment. That the piece is self-edited is the real distinction. The voice is more able to be itself. If it’s a good one, that’s a real plus.

But this type of column is not really a blog in the commonly understood way. Bob Cringely’s weekly piece over at PBS.org, for example, is more a part of the mainstream than the blogosphere. Online content platforms shouldn’t all be rubbed with the ashes of MySpace. The top end is converging with the mainstream and morphing into it as papers and magazines get digital and learn the tricks of the trade from online journalists and technologists.

There’s no either/or here. Why should there be? Let’s welcome the craft of print to the internet, not forgetting its wealth, and develop our own native pixelcraft to help the mergers along. That’s happening already.

Ultimately, in any field, only 5% succeed, and they can usually do the job anywhere. Blog “culture” will quickly be submerged by the need to present top quality content to a discerning readership, as printed pamphlets were replaced by organized newspapers in the 17th/18th centuries. As more people read online, so will online content reach out to meet them.

Rago and Riley are opposite poles of the debate. As always, the future lies somewhere in between.

It’s good to see the new owners of The Blog Herald bringing in some heavyweight writers.

The latest addition to the new crew is Scott Karp, fresh off the ink at Publishing 2.0, where he writes at length on all aspects of online publishing.

First off is an interesting piece on “user generated content” : is it exploitation, or the legitimate satisfaction of a craving for attention?

The key issue in my mind is how the explosion of user-generated content will affect over the long term how the finite pie of media attention is allocated. If media consumers start to spend more time with user-generated content (i.e. content that is produced “for free” by users of open platforms) than they do with “professional” content (i.e. content that is expensive to produce — think Hollywood), then this issue of allowing users to choose to share in the cash economy will come to a head because the cash value of each user contribution will increase over time.

Scott’s doing a weekly column at TBH. Should be worth following.

On the principle that you can’t beat simplicity and a flash of light, I’ve changed the livery on Syntagma.

We’ll be having a freshly-designed network template in the new year, so I’m basically trying out ideas to see what best fits the ambience.

And, yes, we do have an ambience. Steely, decisive, cutting-edge.