Lots of conversation around the place about Dave Winer’s post (now two) on “why Feedburner’s in trouble” — Feedburner is a service that manages your feeds in various innovative ways, but not before it swallows your URL into its own.

At first glance it seems that everybody is now using FB. We at Syntagma are not, although I did adopt it for six months a couple of years ago. What put me off was the thought that if China, say, barred the Feedburner domain, as they’re apt to do, you would be blocked too, along with millions (?) of other sites. The words “eggs” and “basket” spring unbidden to the mind.

The stats provision was great, mind you, and they also handle advertising in the feeds. It’s become a pretty comprehensive service, which I believe is still free for most users.

So, why don’t we just bite the bullet and sign up with FB? First, a little philosophy.

As far as software goes, I’m not one of those chaps who’s constantly on the lookout for small incremental improvements in performance from shiny new apps. I use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer because almost everything else in the business environment is compatible. They are about as universal as it gets offline and on and allow me to relax about most things while getting on with the toil of earning a living.

So why not Feedburner?

One, it’s so ruddy intricate and adds yet another raft of complexity and layers of choice to an already over-engineered online world. I recoil from its sheer brilliance. If it paid me $10,000 a month, I probably would consider it — it would be worth the hassle. But I know it won’t, so I don’t.

Dave’s point that new owner, Google (no less), may tie the product to its Google Reader and other apps, is another point of contention. Lazily, I’m still on Bloglines, although I do have Reader set up — it’s rarely used for the same reason I don’t use Newsgator any more. Bloglines fulfils my simple needs and, by and large, performs well. Why chop and change for the sake of it?

So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.

We should always remember that the people who come to the internet to spend money and swot up on a topic are not geeks and students at Stanford. They are ordinary folk who don’t want all that complexity, but a simple user interface that intuitively guides them seamlessly to what they want.

That’s what “the next billion users” need. Let’s not forget them.

It’s never pleasant deleting or permanently archiving poorly-performing sites that have become a drain on a network, but it has to be done. Apart from good housekeeping, they affect the bottom line and reduce the profitability contributed by other hard-working sites.

I’ve been pruning and paring for a while now, but the next couple of weeks will see a final push towards a more balanced network.

To begin the process, I’ve started with my own personal blog, which has been up for all of a week. Why? I’ve never been much of a blogger. I like to write about ideas, phenomena, events and things. I never like to write about myself, so I’m not much use as a blogger.

Blogging, in its native sense of web log, is writing about yourself. Any other form of writing, even on blog platforms, is really reportage and commentary. To me, blogs are introspective and usually egotistical. Twitter is full of bloggers who imagine there’s an audience for their “tweets” : I’m going to the coffee shop … I’m having a latte … I’m sending an email to Fred … etcetera. There are even feeds for this stuff. Birdseed for birdbrains.

Why do they do it? Dunno, but it must be cathartic to imagine there’s an audience hanging on your every move. It’s the everyday equivalent of the celebrity who won’t leave the house without a film crew in tow.

It’s the same with blog posts. When I moved Syntagma to its present domain, I read through 500 or so old posts intending to bring them over. In the end I transferred 50 or so. The rest simply didn’t stand the test of time. They were either hopelessly wrong, or just plain batty.

Blog posts are essentially conversations — one-way most of the time. If you were able to replay your recent voice conversations with other people, would you actually want to?

So when I read an article by Dave Winer yesterday on the BBC website, I was surprised that he’s prepared to pay a largish sum of money to Google or Amazon to host his online bloggings “in perpetuity”. He even suggests they might be beamed into space so they’ll last forever.

Interesting that he chooses Google or Amazon. Google is less than a decade old, and Amazon can’t have been more than 15 years in the online retail business. Can you imagine either of them being around in 50 years, let alone 50 centuries.

Ancient Alexandria was the intellectual and spiritual centre of the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria was a wonder, preserving the knowledge and science of the ancient world. To have your work on a scroll or codex in that place would ensure it lasted forever.

Then a bunch of fundamentalist Christians came along and burnt it to the ground. After that “success” they did it again later, with the works of the Gnostics, which were only rediscovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt where they were hidden underground in pots. The pots proved more durable than all of man’s artifice in protecting ancient knowledge.

Why would Google or Amazon fare any better than the Great Library of Alexandria? They won’t, for course. Nothing lasts forever.

I would suggest Dave carefully sifts through his online archives, choosing only the bits that are still interesting today, and have them printed into durable books on quality paper and in robust bindings. He should then donate copies to libraries around the world, like the British Library, the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, etcetera. He would then have a better chance of his work seeing out the next 500 years than relying on Google and Amazon.

He should also bury a few copies in earthenware pots, in Death Valley, California, the Negev and Sahara deserts. Somewhere hot and dry, or they’ll rot over time. Climate change is the big imponderable here, of course.

On balance, I think he should just delete them, as I’ve done with my personal blog. Then, like Shakespeare and Homer, his work may be preserved in living memory by public demand, not by hosted servers paid ahead until the end of time.

Chronicles of wasted time … in praise of ladies dead and knights sublime. After Shakespeare

Yes, I’ve got a blog. I thought it was about time to lift my game with Google. Also, I’ve wanted to separate my personal stuff — such as it is — from the business for a while now. Some internal developments at Syntagma Towers are pushing me in that direction too.

There’s not much on it yet. I do have a lot of plans for it, however, so you are welcome to set foot on its pristine pages. Mind the wet floor.

Find it at : http://www.johnmevans.com

With internet advertising increasing rapidly, the need for a big player to step up to the plate and provide a Big Ad Lite service has become obvious, especially to users of weblog technology. Now Google is moving into this marketplace and, as with Adsense, it’s likely to set the standard.

The Wall Street Journal reports :

The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks. [...]

Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way — through a salesperson — or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space — called “inventory” — remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.

This is good news for a significant swathe of small online businesses stuck between the vast mass of “blogs” beneath and the bigco websites above.

If Google can come up with an automatic solution as simple and seller-friendly as Text Link Ads, with geo-location and other factors built in, it will take mass advertising on the net to a new level. It will also improve the bottom lines of small-business digital networks beyond recognition.

Google’s buy-out of DoubleClick provides the platform. This could be the most exciting development for online business in years, taking advertising from professional operators to ordinary publishers on the shop floor.

Jason Calacanis has just launched Mahalo, a search engine with real humans making some of the decisions. Crazy? Nothing wrong with humans. A bit slow, but generally much more intuitive and accurate than machines. It’s still in alpha so we must wait awhile before testing it properly.

Like most people I suppose, I searched for my name, “John Evans”, and it wasn’t there. But Mahalo did offer to email me when it was. Now that’s what I call service. You search for a name and then you wait for an email. They are though only five months into a five-year project. Nice touch.

I also searched for Syntagma, and bingo, we came 2nd and third on the list, below Syntagma Square, Athens, but above all the other companies now calling themselves Syntagma. Result!

So what’s the idea behind the human operators? This is from the press release :

Are humans better than machines at creating search results?

Yes and no. Humans cannot possibly create as many search results as machines, nor can they go as deep on each search result. However, humans using machines can create much better search results than machines alone. Our “Guides” use Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Flickr, Delicious, and dozens of other services to hand-craft the cleanest, most organized, and spam-free SeRPs available today.

How much time do you spend building a SeRP? It takes a couple of hours to create a solid search result. However, these results need to be maintained by our Guides on an ongoing basis.

This is an interesting concept and it will be good to watch it mature. I’ll be waiting for that email too. The release doesn’t specify whether the Guides will be responsible for taking the search on from my query, but I guess that’s the way the system works.

So long as I come top, I’ll be content.

Try Mahalo yourself.

We’ve had Windows Vista for a month now on brand new kit intended to replace our XP boxes here in the Syntagma office. Previous posts (here and here) described our initial experiences, so I won’t trawl through them again.

Although we still have our XP machines running alongside the new Vista boxes, the proportion of usage by time has swung massively in favour of Vista. We’re now using the V-machines for 90 percent of the time.

The exceptions are still jobs which require the printers, like accounts, stats and letters for Post Office delivery. None of our printers will work with Vista, so we’ll be replacing them very soon.

Everything else is now happily done on the much faster, number-crunching, new computers. Of course, we’d switched a lot of stuff online before moving over : all email is now done on Gmail — a huge relief on new computers — and much else too. I’ve even taken to using Google Documents for smaller jobs, but can’t quite get myself to use the spreadsheets, especially as we now have Office 2007 Excel working on Vista.

Thankfully, our desk-top-publishing program works seamlessly on Vista, but not the image-handling one. As a temporary measure I’ve been using the Office image software bundled with Windows itself. It works so well, I’ll probably stick with it for the duration.

Apart from that, the increase in performance is so good, we stifle a groan every time we have to use the XP machines.

I know a number of our readers are looking for new computers with XP pre-installed, as they don’t trust Vista yet. Let me tell you, put your doubts aside. Get as much as you can online — Google is a blessing here, buy new printers, tweak your internet connection, and you won’t look back.

Be aware, though, that the “Protection Mode”, which is the default setting for Vista, may have to be temporarily shut down while you add new stuff or get your broadband connectivity working. Thereafter, it’s surprising how quickly you will adapt to the loss af admin powers, which is what it effectively does.

Syntagma’s Advice? Go for Windows Vista now. There’s nothing to keep you on XP but your fear of the unknown.

It’s not easy to confuse Microsoft with Google at the best of times, but you may be excused for doing so with a new MS offering.

When I started Syntagma Media, bookkeeping and accountancy were real problems. We bought a couple of expensive packages — Quickbooks and Sage — but both were far too complex for a simple content business selling only ad space online.

Nowadays we rely on professional services, but for bootstrapping startups a quick, easy and FREE startup accountancy package would be a blessing.

So who’s going to provide this yummy piece of kit, Google? Maybe, but Microsoft got there first and it’s part of its Office suite. Wonders never cease.

Thanks to Rick Segal for the hat tip. Download Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 here.

Rick, of course, has form when it comes to free business offerings. See Syntagma’s piece here from November 2005.

You just gotta give it to the guy. Genius isn’t in it. Jason Calacanis has just written not only the funniest post I’ve read in a while, but also the smartest traffic-hoovering machine in years. I’d call it the industrialization of backlink aggregation. Google watch out — Professor Moriarty is on the case.

Now, if you think I’m doing this post to get a link back from Jason, get a life! His post tickled me puce, that’s all.

Oh, and did I mention he is former Editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, “once profiled in New Yorker piece…,” former GM of Netscape, Brooklyn born, or “his trusty bulldog Toro by his side.”?

His injunction, “DO lie and say we hung out one night back in the Silicon Alley days or after a conference and that I’m actually a really cool guy once you get to know me.” is not possible since I NEVER lie. I once sang a duet with Elvis though.

He ends : If you follow these “Calacanis Link Bait” strategies I will link to you. If you just come out and beat me up I probably won’t… so, there you have it “how to get a link from Calacanis.”

I suspect this is a clever way of using his campaign against SEO, which I totally agree with in an unflashy sort of way, to practise a little of it himself.

Darren at Problogger take note, you have serious competition.

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.