Steve Rubel has some pertinent views on the whole Web 2.0 bubble and the crazy valuations and hype being bandied around right now.

Last week’s Google strike on the company’s advertising competitors — which may have put a lot of small internet operators out of business — illustrates how quickly the weather can change.

Rubel doesn’t beat about the bush, “This is a sad time for the web. It’s as almost somber as the time just before the last bubble burst in 2000. I was working in PR with dot-com startups at the time and the way I feel now is how I did back then.”

Regular readers of Syntagma will recognize the sentiments he expresses, especially in this passage, “… over the last year my thinking has evolved dramatically. I have become less interested in every new shiny object and more engrossed in the social changes it, slowly, effects. This is in part a byproduct of the tech blogosphere getting drunk on its own Kool-Aid.”

No more first fine careless rapture then.

The picture of the internet I see right now is of steady progress, both in the underlying technologies and also the growing professionalism of many quietly working away under its wing.

Overarching all that is the froth and hyperactivity of a new bubble-in-the-making. From the outside, however, only the nonsense is visible. People are being sucked in with promises, only to be swept aside as technical parameters are changed without notice and the marshals overwhelmed by the cowboys and injuns. It really is a Wild West out there.

That the fundamentals are gradually being put in place is great news for those of us who retain our enthusiasm for the web and will continue to use it as the base for professional and commercial activities.

Are we then approaching another collapse in internet values? We are not immune from the wider economy :

* Oil is nearly $100 a barrel
* Gold is approaching $1000 an ounce
* Housing markets in the US, Britain and Europe are heading south
* Stockmarkets are wobbling tortuously
* The credit crunch has yet to peak
* Inter-bank lending is at a standstill
* Inflation is ominously poised for a comeback.

These are all strong indicators of trouble ahead for everyone.

I’ve long believed that it’s a mistake to follow the crowd. The herd will always produce a glut in the end and the subsequent fall in values will put most out of business.

It’s only those who dig their own distinctive furrows and apply basic cash-flow techniques in the time-honoured manner who will survive the deluge.

And “deluge” seems the only appropriate term for the time ahead.

The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW), its markup language, HTML, and its protocols, like HTTP, will today become a member of the most exclusive club of all.

Some members of the Order of Merit

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a modest Englishman who arguably did more to create the internet than anyone else — especially the boastful Al Gore — will today receive the Order of Merit from the Queen. The Order is limited to 24 of the most distinguished people on the planet. It’s in the personal gift of the Queen, not the politicians, so carries far greater kudos than the buyable baubles dished out to friends of Downing Street.

There will be no fuss or fanfare, no procession of the great and the good. The members will wear simple lounge suits, and few onlookers will even notice the cars entering Buckingham Palace this morning, or know that the occupants will have lunch with the Queen and Prince Philip.

Before the main event, the Queen will have a private chat with the newest member, Sir Tim, and present him with his decoration, a small blue and crimson cross with a laurel wreath in the centre and a gold inscription : “For Merit”.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM

The Order has existed for 105 years and had a total of 174 members. Recipients have included, Thomas Hardy, Sir Edward Elgar, Florence Nightingale, Henry Moore and Sir Winston Churchill. More recently, Margaret Thatcher was made an OM, as was Betty Boothroyd, the first woman Speaker of the House of Commons.

It’s a suitable honour for Berners-Lee, whose work is made use of by almost everyone on Earth on a daily basis. It’s hard to think of anyone who has had such an impact on the life of the planet and yet is almost totally unknown. No Paris Hilton he. Membership of this elite Order is perhaps the perfect decoration for such a modest man.

The words “For Merit” are well chosen. Today’s world is full of trashy icons with no merit except a talent for self-promotion. Many crash and burn like the flimsy creations they are. Yet there are still people out there like Berners-Lee, but their depth of intellect and pioneering spirit are not valued by many, or the populist media that serve them.

Thankfully Britain still has ways of celebrating them, albeit with a small cross and lunch with the Monarch and peers of their merit.

Syntagma salutes Sir Tim, OM, and celebrates his achievements.

Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated Wordpress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”

We’ve long been Cringely fans here at Syntagma, even when the sage gets it all wrong. Well, a perfect world is not very interesting, is it.

Next week we are promised an earth-shattering moment from the frog. In his own words :

“And speaking of clever inventions, I want to give fair warning that next week I will make an announcement in this space so astounding that even my 83-year-old mother may pay attention. I intend to change the world a little bit and — as always — will need your help if I am to be successful.”

We’ll be queuing up for the column next Friday, Cringe old chap.

It better be good!

The internet is dead and boring according to Mark Cuban, internet A-lister, venture capitalist and TV impresario. He believes it has become a “utility” and therefore a bit like electricity or water — yawn-inducing!

As always this kind of argument concentrates on the medium not the message. For example, ten years ago childrens’ books were dead in the water — today’s kids are “visual”, brought up on screen games and videos. They couldn’t get into textual stuff at all.

Then the Harry Potter books arrived on the scene. Not only did they revolutionize the sales of children’s books, they also hugely boosted another old medium, the movies.

We’re always saying here in Syntagma that the medium is boring — it should be. All mediums should be unobtrusive, allowing creativity to flourish. The message is the thing. Find exciting new content and even the most ancient technologies, like books, magazines, television and film, come to life in a splurge of fresh excitement and initiative.

The internet is a platform. At present, there’s nothing to match it as a pipe for instant content. Most content is rubbish, of course, but the opportunities are there for anyone who can grab the public’s attention or imagination.

The medium is not the message. The message allows the medium to thrive. Quality content makes the internet valuable. Find that, and you’re in business.

A few years ago, when I headed up a marketing department at BT (British Telecom), I asked a Sunday Times tech journalist, whose work I admired, to write a short piece on packet switching (the base technology of the internet) for one of our publications.

When the copy arrived I thought it must be a joke. The piece was full of spelling mistakes and basic grammatical errors. I was shocked by the lack of pride in craftsmanship — although technically it was correct.

If I tell you it was only 300 words long and the asking price (agreed) was £300 ($600), you get some idea of my disappointment.

Naturally, I refused to pay — an office junior could have done better. The journalist pointed out that we had use of his name (true) and that he had sub-editors at the Sunday Times to knock his copy into shape. He then threatened that if I still refused to pay, he would get the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to picket BT Headquarters.

The Honcho above me ordered me to pay him off immediately. The Chairman would be incensed to find pickets on his red carpet entrance.

Although I’d done a bit of freelance journalism for the nationals before then, it was my first real taste of in-house pros. I was not impressed. (I should point out here that I commissioned other journalists after that and many were just fine.)

Now to blogging. In my view, online writers let themselves down by taking pride in the wild and woolly world of blogging. There are some excellent writers in the tech blogosphere, some even write for the nationals. Jeff Jarvis (The Buzz Machine), for example, pens frequent features for The Guardian (UK). And there are many others. The distinction between print and online publishing is narrowing by the day. Print journalism isn’t disappearing, it’s just taking over more and more of the online space.

The description “blogger” has a certain cachet in the political world, because politicians, with lots to hide, are terrified of them. The mainstream media watches them like hawks in case they miss a scoop or some realtime dirt. But this is a narrow slice of a much wider market for news, commentary and on-the-spot reportage.

I have to say, there’s a bit of cultural cringe about blogging in general, especially among those who take themselves half seriously. The belief that mainstream journalists are necessarily better, or better informed, is not borne out by facts. In the tech sphere, for instance, online material is usually way ahead of the MSM in detail and accuracy.

Take the recent Wall Street Journal non-story on the “10th anniversary of blogging”. The reporter made a good stab at the topic but was no match for people writing online who had been in on it personally. Like most inventions, there’s a long incubation period involving different individuals who each put a piece or two in the jigsaw puzzle. But the editor seemed to want a nice crisp date, and a hero to parade before the world. There wasn’t one, so an obscure figure was dredged from the swamp of time and shoved into the limelight with mud still running down his face.

D’you know, I can’t even remember his name, poor devil.

Back to the tag “blogger”. It’s a well-known fact that in the theatre a tragedian is taken far more seriously than a clown. Sometimes that’s unfair, because the clown can have more talent, and entertain many more people.

By tagging ourselves as bloggers, we hand a monumental advantage to the print journalist. We can be dismissed as clowns and unprofessional bag carriers.

For the political thorn-in-the-side, it’s a smart move. For anyone who wants to be taken seriously by the big, rotten world, not only their peers in Techmeme, it’s not just shooting oneself in the foot, it’s aiming a silver bullet at the heart.

So let’s resolve to be writers, journalists, authors — not bloggers. Forget the medium, think the message.

As our lamented former Monarch, King George V might have put it, “Bugger blogging!”

Only this morning someone asked me where we got our name Syntagma from. It happens quite a lot.

The original Syntagma Towers in Athens

The boring answer is that I found it through Linguistic Philosophy — do not switch off! It means creating a “whole” from many parts, as words make up a sentence. A bit like a blog network, in fact.

There is a much more famous meaning, though. Syntagma is the name of the Greek Constitution, and also the Square where the Parliament (pictured) is located. I really didn’t know about all that when I named this ship and all who sail in her : Syntagma.

The guidebooks say :

Syntagma (constitution in Greek) is the square in front of the Parliament (formerly the King’s Palace, built between 1836 and 1840 by King Otto and financed by his father Ludwig I of Bavaria) and it is considered the main square of Athens.

Interestingly, our Syntagma is number one on Google for the word “syntagma”, just above the Greek Constitution and Square.

How’s that for fame?

We’ve been experimenting with a new system of content production here at Syntagma. Apart from our team of proven, regular authors, we’ve been driving newer sites from a small base of in-house writers — people who also work in some capacity for us and have expertise in specific fields.

It will be coming on-stream from next Monday, July 2.

The reason for this new approach is that we’ve adopted a tighter focus for the Syntagma network, specializing in certain areas we know to be effective revenue-earners. We can better manage such a team from within, rather than relying on a sprawling web of freelances across the globe.

Of course, we’ve still got some writers spread around the world, but these are authors who have proved reliable over time. In other words, we will become more like a business producing print magazines in structure, than a typical blog network — a model we’ve been moving away from for a while now.

We’re closing the Allusionz network magazine on July 1, and will be using our three remaining portals as the base for a variety of new activities, not all conventional or expected.

As a small, compact business, we have great flexibility of manoeuvre. We don’t have to stand still or follow the rest. We won’t.

New sources of finance mean we are tentatively moving away from the cash-flow-techniques model we’ve adopted thus far, although we will never go down the venture capital route for reasons given here many times.

So there will be new energy and new blood next month here at Syntagma.

Silly question, I know, given that bloggers are said to hit the keyboard naked more times than not. If there’s no need to dress up in your best bib and tucker, why bother?

I am though talking about “entrepreneurs”, not bloggers, who can descend to the lowest depths at the drop of a hat — or anything else for that matter.

But, since I now have a blog, I suppose I’ll have to look into the matter of the dress code for posting on MySpace.

I’m often reminded that my standard photo online is of me in a t-shirt pictured in the south of Spain. So I’ve been looking through my photo archive to find a shot of moi in a business suit. They are very few in number I can tell you, in fact, vanishingly small.

Happily I disovered a solitary example — I had to scan it from a 6in x 4in photograph, so most of the colours are too dark.

I’m guessing though that most internet entrepreneurs would be unable to find such a shot in their own picture galleries. Unless, of course, they had won an award and were captured collecting the prize.

And what about the money guys? Do VCs, who wring so much sweat out of their hapless prey, wear suits as a deliberate ploy to intimidate their laid back customers?

I really don’t know, having never met a venture capitalist in my life.

But it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?