That’s a question we all ask ourselves from time to time, especially in periods of transition.

Would I do anything differently with Syntagma Media if I knew what I know now?

The answer is pretty obvious : Yes, I’d go straight to where we’re going next without all the bits in between.

But life isn’t like that. We have to travel the long learning curve to get a rounded view of the basics and intermediates before we tackle the more complex areas.

So, where are we going next? I’m afraid I’m going to break the habit of a lifetime and stay partially dumb. Except …

This last week I’ve been reorganizing the inventory and the magazines — they will now have a more flexible content list. Where one site overlaps the readership of two mags, relevant posts will appear in each, for example. Syntagma will also appear in Phi.

As an interim measure, we’re cutting back on underperforming sites and merging similar sites that would do better together than apart. This will cut down on our admin and trim costs. We’re having a new general logo and a separate, initially-hidden, subset of sites, codenamed, Syntagma Confidential. And, no, these are not naughty sites, just experimental; the testbed of innovative ideas for the future.

The main bone of contention, though, has been the means of tackling the huge retail projects we still have in mind. In the light of the perceived — and actual — glass ceiling we’re grappling with to enter the upper echelons of this sector, I’m going to try out a smaller, less competitive, commercial sector in order to develop and attract the skills and infrastructure to tackle the Everest of retail mid-2007.

We’re also developing our growing inventory of new book serializations. Following Steve Newman’s continuing tour de force of the Hemingway serialization of his fictionalized biography of the author’s life, he’s now putting up his new Victorian crime novel, The Crime of the Crimea featuring the detective duo, Swann and Parker. This will be preceded by a juicy Christmas story : The Great Christmas Train Robbery, written exclusively for Syntagma readers. Watch out for this soon.

On another tack, we’ll be following the expected nuptials of Prince William to Kate Middleton on a separate, dedicated site. The huge tidal waves of traffic to our Royal Anecdotes offering, with the comments becoming a regular forum for every Royal fan and n*tc*se, tells us there’s a vast appetite for this subject out there. If every site in our network had the unique visitor stats of RA, we’d be close to the kind of traffic we need for a major breakthough in the biggest-ticket advertising.

But our main area of progress through 2007 will be in upgrading the backend technical side, plus unveiling a new template for our individual Wordpress websites. Small beer, perhaps, but necessary for our upcoming assault on mainstream media.

People always ask me why I’m so “obsessed” with advertising. The reason is simple : a content business lives by ad revenues alone. We don’t do subscriptions or direct sales (yet). Our entire stock of treasure comes from our advertisers, and those who click on Google Adsense.

It’s often not appreciated that professional content would virtually disappear from the internet were it not for advertising support. Yes, the big egos would still be there jostling for attention, but real writers would all but vanish.

So we value our advertisers past, present and still to come, and wish them a great December of sales, and, dare I say it, a very merry Christmas.

Something has been nagging away at me for months about the nature of online original content publishing. I’ve expressed it in many ways on this site, not the least in our conversion to a portalized, network magazine format.

At our end of the market — so-called blog networks — we are about a third of the way up the octave of scale … a bit above individual blogs, but below the aggregators and the mega-rich print publishers now streaming into the internet.

As Gurdjieff pointed out that’s a dangerous place to be because it’s where you hit the first half-interval in the octave, the project equivalent of Beecher’s Brook.

The initial rush to big blog networks was prompted by Weblogs Inc, both its ambition — to be a $10m business — and its eventual sale to AOL for a reported $25m. Did it ever get to a $10m valuation prior to the sale? I don’t think so.

Blog networks are publishers of original content. As I’ve been saying for a while, their scale and the distributed nature of their niches, make them more like online, atomized magazines, than any other comparison. And this places a glass ceiling above their expandability.

Recently Syntagma Media hit that ceiling with our wish to attract serious retail advertising by launching two massive network magazines, one in the US and the other in the UK. I’ve documented the problems in making that decision, here and here.

There are three choices for a network at the point we are :

1. Stick with the blogosphere and its useful, but small-scale rewards.
2. Scale up massively into a cut-throat market dominated by the giants of mainstream media.
3. Rely more on selling content directly, i.e. in print or eprint formats.

Syntagma has one foot in #1, another in #3, and waning ambitions in #2. At any rate diversification is the way forward.

Scott Karp has a great crack at understanding this conundrum on his blog, Publishing 2.0, today:

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., Gawker, TechCrunch, Paid Content — they are successful at their scale, but that scale is still tiny compared to the scale of the aggregation businesses. Even portals like AOL and Yahoo are much more aggregators of content than original producers of content.

That’s the essence of the problem I’ve been trying to articulate on Syntagma for most of this year. My friendly warnings to other owners seemingly going for broke, have been misinterpreted as “jabs”, or jealousy.

The Blog Herald

Now we hear that The Blog Herald has been sold by Matt Craven of BlogMedia Inc, now Problogging Inc, to follow the first route of relying on blog consultancy, mainly to Fortune 500 companies. Apart from the fact that only 3pc of F500 bigcos indulge in business blogging, it’s not easy to get access to these companies unless you have goldplated contacts within them.

The short golden age of the blog network is over. Does that mean that original content provision is over too? No, you just have to accept yourself as a small-to-medium business that will never attract the buyout checkbooks of a Google or a Yahoo.

Is that so bad? Not at all. It’s what the vast majority of businesses do all the time. Having once worked close to the boardroom of a major telecoms company, I would say : it’s a far, far better thing you do than facing Madame Guillotine twice a day.

Many thanks to those of you who, in response to my previous post, sent emails full of ideas and advice. Most of it was very helpful, and assisted me in making up my mind.

Which is : I’ve decided that I’m going to cut back on my current workload, get my two books finished by new year, then pile into the project over the winter.

I’ll start modestly, see how it goes, take advice, then commit resources as needed, including quite a bit of outsourcing. All this will take place behind the scenes, so nothing will be visible until mid-2007.

My instinct told me I should go for broke on this one, but in the second year of the business I’m looking for profitability rather than endless expansion.

One of the reasons I’ve been reminiscing on my publishing career over the past two days is because I’m now faced with a very big decision concerning Syntagma Media.

It revolves around a proposed major offshoot business : Syntagma Retail, which would publish two giant online network magazines — ShopShape UK and Retailz USA.

The problem is scalability. “blog networks” are essentially small-scale things, whatever the evangelists may say. In comparison with the GigaCos offline they are peanuts — to use a retail analogy.

Scaling up to the point where you can offer advertising space to the likes of Marks and Spencer, Tesco or Ikea is a quantum leap resting on a quantum leap.

When I asked about the likely investment needed, my friends in retail consultancy suggested a ballpark figure that matched Wembley Stadium in dimensions. My blood still runs cold when I think of it.

The question that intrigues me, though, is not the standard business approach but the mechanics of the operation. Could such a leap be built over time without opening an office in Mayfair? Would I want an office in Mayfair? — lunch at the Cafe Royal would be nice.

Should a publishing man even consider jumping into an industry about which he knows zilch+, or marginally less?

On the other hand, such thoughts haven’t stopped me in the past. Rags-to-riches is my middle name — usually in the reverse direction.

It all comes down to the complexity of the operation and the amount of work and expertise required. At present, I’m running Syntagma Media at the outer edge of my own capabilities and availability.

But the opportunity is there. There has never been a better time to do it, given that I have contacts who know what to do and the clout to make it happen. Not forgetting the vast and growing markets that adventurous retailing now commands, with the likes of China, India and Brazil the new frontiers waiting to be “conquered”.

So, what do Syntagma readers think? Let me have your views, please. I’ll take silence as a yes, obscenity as a no.

When I finally returned from Spain to England, my first thoughts were to publish all the philosophical writing I’d done there. However, a catastrophic fall in the Iberian housing market meant that I needed to make money, not lose it — which is what philosophy famously does.

I decided to utilize my former science background by setting up an educational publishing company — Dial Publishing, specializing in courses on technical writing, editing and publishing. Here’s the cover of our first course :

I also had a book on Technical Writing published by trade publisher, Newnes, now part of William Heinemann. Here it is :

The splendid news for us (me and my business partner) was that the British Government was at the time paying 80pc of students’ fees for accredited courses. After a lot of unnecessary compliance work, ours were accredited. We had six courses in total under the series title of Writing for Business and Technology, all written by yours truly.

However, to justify the name Dial Publishing, I also edited and published a literary quarterly : The Dial. Here’s the cover of the first issue :

This phase rapidly came to a close when HM Gov — in its wisdom — suddenly scrapped the £2 billion ($3.8bn) scheme because, it said, it was being abused by Animal Rights activists. Well, Pooter lives.

After that bombshell it seemed simpler to take to the net where you sank or swam by your own efforts, not at the behest of hopeless ministers and civil servants. And that, folks, was when Syntagma Media came kicking and squealing into the world.

I haven’t mentioned my philosophical books because they’re not quite relevant here. But one is to be published next June by Humdrumming. It’s called : The Nirvaneans — The Natural History of Nirvana.

And that’s not the pop band — although I suppose pop bands could have a natural history since they smoke so much grass.

I’ve also got three short stories coming out in May (again under the Humdrumming imprint) in the form of Naked Tales, another in the series of books produced by our writers’ cabal, Writers Blog Alliance.

But I’m name-dropping too much here. Ah, one name I’ve forgotten, though : Dial Publishing, now the print publishing arm of Syntagma Media, is set to rise again phoenix-fashion from the Ashes urn, with The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Publisher of Network Magazines.

Not to be missed.

And that ends my short series on one strand in my publishing career to date. Anyone still out there ….?

Matt Craven has just announced in The Blog Herald that BlogMedia Inc is rebadging itself, Problogging Inc and effectively selling off its blog network brick by brick. It’s unclear right now whether they mean to sell The Blog Herald, Blog Network Watch and Blog Network List as well.

On their other site, Problogging.com, Matt writes in more detail :

“As many of you have noted over the past few weeks, we’ve slowly been divesting ourselves of much of our blog network. This is part of a deliberate strategy to move beyond the “wide & deep” network strategy that we have employed in the past in order to refocus our efforts on our consulting business and expand more into services for professional bloggers, including directly consulting in that arena.”

As I’ve written here many times, I believe the blog network concept was over-egged because Weblogs Inc was seen as a network rather than two superstar tech websites. The charge out of this space is becoming more like a stampede. As I write, Steve Rubel is asking whether Weblogs Inc itself will survive within AOL now that Jason Calacanis has left.

From Syntagma Media’s point of view, we have not been a blog network for quite a while, converting to a publisher of Network Magazines some months ago. We look forward to a buoyant future.

Name me an entrepreneur who bought out the venture capitalists backing his nascent company because they were (allegedly) interfering too much and holding his business back?

Evan Williams did just that with his ailing podcast company, Odeo, now renamed Obvious. It was a counter-intuitive move that has nevertheless made him something of a hero among the indie startup crowd who want to stay in control of their businesses.

He says : “It’s about building Web properties that are interesting and worthwhile and potentially make money but are not runaway YouTube-like successes or considered a failure.”

It’s that either/or that drives the gambling instinct behind venture capital. The excitement of picking a winner, the shrug when a loser goes down. Who cares? It’s other people’s money anyway. And the next YouTube will cancel out all the losses in any case.

But there are those who don’t want to be packaged neatly for sale or an IPO. They just want to run their businesses. Evan Williams is one of those and put his own money where his mouth is.

Mark Pincus, whose company, Tribe, hasn’t prospered despite $9.5 million in venture money, said of Williams : “He comes off like a folk hero to other entrepreneurs. We need a model that allows for more experimentation and play.”

The New York Times comments : “The relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs has always been somewhat contentious. When things go well — think Netscape, eBay, Google — everyone gets rich and ends up happy. But often, entrepreneurs struggle with venture capitalists for control of their companies, grow tired of their demands and complain that their businesses get hijacked by financiers dead set on hitting a home run.”

Bootstrapping a business is the traditional answer, though not in fields that are capital-intensive. These days, because of the plummeting costs of hardware, software and bandwidth, it is possible to build a substantial internet company using careful cash-flow techniques and funded by expertise and hard work rather than VC money. A credit card is vital in the beginning, but if you’re good at what you do and you have a sustainable vision, even that source of funding will fall away.

Evan Williams injected $2 million of his own money to buy back Odeo. It was cash he had from selling Pyra Labs — creator of Blogger.com — to mighty Google. Now he wants to have fun and be creative. Not everyone is in that position, of course. But he did it the hard way, and he’s being upfront about his mistakes and his vision of the future.

Syntagma Media was built in that way, largely because it started as a hobby or sideline, and as the future subject of a book on bootstrapping. Experimental though it was, it’s now taken on a life of its own and captured mine in the process. In the end, it’s the vision that counts and, broadly, it’s stayed on course and made some money. Even the book remains, moving steadily along the pipeline.

The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Magazine Publisher, is to be published by Dial Publishing next year.

Syntagma Media is in lunar orbit at launching the third (and final) network magazine in the current series.

LifeTimes packages all of our Lifestyles and Celebrities sites under one roof, with an editor’s pick of posts and a rolling feed from around the mag.

As ever, it’s been designed by Swedish superstar, Thord Hedengren, who has woven his usual miracles of speed and panache.

We’ve introduced another feature in the form of an Editorial box to bring you the latest news from the network magazine world. At present, of course, that just means Syntagma.

Don’t think we’re lonely up here. We enjoy being in lunar orbit.

Can’t think of anything that rhymes, so just curl up with LifeTimes.

Damn, that doesn’t scan!

Syntagma Media is proud to announce the launch of our second network magazine, 21st-century Phi.

Designed by upcoming design champ Thord Hedengren, it covers the sciences and future technologies stream in our network of 50 Wordpress websites.

As before with Allusionz, there are still features to go up and a couple of sites to resurrect. We’ll be doing that over the next week or so.

Incidentally, Phi is a letter of the Greek alphabet that’s used by science to describe the mathematical formula behind a spiral form that occurs over and over in nature. The spiral of a conch shell is phi. We don’t choose names at random, you know.

Our third network magazine, LifeTimes — lifestyles and celebrities — is going up in a few days, to judge by the speed Thord gets things done.

If you’re a technology addict who can’t get enough of the stuff, please don’t sigh, just read Phi.