Darren Rowse of Problogger shows us around his new office in Melbourne on video and invites everyone to display their own. Here’s a couple of pics of Syntagma Media’s current office :

The working part of the Syntagma office

The meeting zone

As you can see it’s a bit cramped, even for two people working. The meeting area is cozy, to put it mildly. We really need a two-room office.

However, we are moving house and office later this year, so it’s a work in progress.

So what we’ve been experiencing for some months now has reached its apogee. Google PageRank values right across the blogosphere are tumbling like nine-pins in a storm. Some sites have fallen from highs of 6 or 7 to new lows of 2.

At first I thought this might be a general rebalancing of the system, getting everyone used to lower rankings and allowing more scope for megasites at the top end. But it seems it goes beyond that.

Darren Rowse at Problogger has seen a drop in his seminal site from 6 to 4. The belief of many commenters is that Google is attempting to crush the trade in text link ads.

However, since Google’s own Adsense is mostly a form of text links, albeit (presumably) with a no-follow hard-coded in, this does seem to be a restraint of trade for commercial websites competing with Google’s overarching system.

PageRank is awarded on the basis of backlinks, rather than raw traffic data. Nevertheless, traffic and backlinks often go hand in hand. A popular site will have both to some extent.

The Google Dance has changed in recent months. We now get a monthly update instead of the variable quarterly adjustment that reigned previously. What, though, persuaded Googleplex chiefs allegedly to attack a legitimate commercial operation that just happens to have an impact on the Adsense/Adwords system?

Text links usually have anchor text advertising a commercial service of some kind. Why should that be any different from Adsense text blocks? Except in obvious cases, how can the algorithm distinguish between links posted for PR enhancement and those genuinely seeking extra business by an online form of classified advertising?

It can’t.

Brock Boser, Chief Operating Officer of New York-based Text-Link-Ads.com — an agency selling ads across the internet — tells me they won’t be reducing their prices in response to the current PR meltdown.

Maybe this will do the trick. Or perhaps the current furore across the blogosphere will persuade Google they are not behaving well and should aim to be less imperialist in their business methods.

Has Google become the new Microsoft?

Update : Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch is comparing blog networks that interlink with link farms and seems to approve the “crackdown”. Come on, Duncan, you’ve owned a blog network and were a founder member of another. Pots and kettles, surely?

Update : Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has cleared up a lot of fog on this subect — “I pinged Google, and they confirmed that PageRank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. … In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well. … Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review.”

Face it, we’ve all come under the cosh in the blogosphere at some time or other. It’s a bit tedious, isn’t it? DoshBlogging is a much better option — and it pays better too.

The Times (London) has a cluster of pieces today under the heading, Blogging for Dosh – the print version is much more comprehensive, so buy a copy if you can.

Apart from the now-mandatory two or three paragraphs on Darren Rowse, Mr Problogger, it looks at other moneymaking phenomena online, such as Perez Hilton, Julie Powell and Clotilde Dusoulier.

Tom Whitwell, whose blog, musicthing.co.uk, makes a bob or two, gives us “Ten ways to get rich blogging”. The best one for me is, “Keep your costs down”. He cites Perez Hilton, whose office is a coffee shop he inhabits all day for the price of a few lattes. Now that’s smart.

But read it yourself.