It’s been announced today that b5media has secured US$2m from Toronto VC Rick Segal and Brightspark Ventures.

Well, they were never going to fail, were they? They had too much talent at the top and too much energy to sink slowly into the quicksands of the blogosphere.

Although I must say, when I read this on the b5 blog, my first thoughts were : two mill will quickly be spent, especially if salaries are to be paid for the first time and new high-powered staff taken on.

We hear that Rick will become Chairman, Brightspark will have a member on the board, a new Head of Sales will be taken on, and that Shel Israel has been advising them since the beginning of the funding project. He will join the business in an advisory capacity. Aaron and few other b5 stalwarts are going fulltime in the business. Darren is to be VP for Training and Development, eventually in a fulltime capacity.

According to the press release, b5 has now badged itself as a “new media network” targeting the mainstream via vertical-specific content. So they too are dropping the “blog network” tag and looking beyond the blogosphere to mainstream commercial publishing in sector-specific areas. If the endgame is creating a serious business, this is the first step to make. Well done them.

I would personally like to congratulate Jeremy on his coup, and wish the other three founders — Darren Rowse, Duncan Riley and Shai Coggins — a fair wind on their new ocean voyage of discovery.

A rumour has reached us that Syntagma Media is in the process of being sold. This is not true, at least as a bare statement of fact. Since someone’s got wind of ongoing discussions, though, I may as well spell out some of the details.

For around four months we’ve been talking to a retail consultancy about a form of cooperation agreement. Initially, they were reluctant to get closely involved with a blog network. Blogs were what their kids did when they weren’t watching cartoons on TV. However, they liked our publishing ethos and the quality of delivered content.

Our move towards a magazine format has quickened their interest and we’re not too far from a deal. My preference would be for them to take a 40% stake in the business and handle the IT and advertising, leaving me to concentrate on the publishing side. It would optimize the expertise in-house.

They have huge experience of the retail business and a large number of high-powered contacts. Were this to happen it would put us in a prime position in the marketplace, especially with big stores and shopping malls.

Maybe now our small band of critics can see the full intention behind the magazine format and leaving behind the Blogosphere Game. To them I say, don’t jump to conclusions when you don’t have all the facts.

[Health Warning] At the risk of causing serious heart flutters among the febrile souls who have been writing furiously about our “desertion” of the blog network space, I’m going to key-in a few words about Web Network Magazines.

Syntagma is now developing slowly into a slightly different entity, aiming at a slightly different, but still online, readership. Change is not lightning fast because there’s just one owner and two helpers on the office side.

The date set for a first beta version of the magazine is our one-year anniversary, October 21, although you’ll see changes progressively until then.

I don’t know why bloggers are fretting over the dropping of the word “blog”. Many new blog-supporting websites and networks have been doing the same for a few years now. MSN Spaces was conceived without using the word. MySpace doesn’t exactly make a feature of its blog connections, either.

So let’s just get away from that word and start looking at the space inclusively, rather than in an elitist blogospheric context. Heather Green has got an interesting post today over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting. Heather writes :

My relatives use the Internet. They’re I think the perfect example of mass market use of the Internet. They send out email chains and check all the popular traditional news sites. They probably visit blogs, but don’t know the difference between them and the other sites they go to. … blog software probably needs to get simpler and more readily available for them to get that part of it.

But then I thought, do they need to blog? … So even as I am confronted with the growth of these technologies, I still think that they are too techie. People can adapt overtime, but why should they? The software should adapt to them.

Here we have the crux of it : a vast army of internet users who don’t know what a blog is, or why it should even exist. Yet, they are customers who shop on the internet, and google up information for a variety of needs.

If you label your product a “blog” network, most new arrivals on your site won’t know what you’re talking about. Ergo, best give them a description they can readily understand.

So why not “magazine”?

Syntagma Media is delighted to welcome three new talented authors to our 12-strong team of writers. In alphabetical order, they are :

Douglas Green, a Canadian horticulturalist and hobby sailor, who will be writing two new websites for us — “Green Gardening With Douglas Green”, and “Windjammer - Discovering Sailing”.

Meenakshi Mammi, who lives on the mystical mountain of Arunachala in southern India, will be authoring, “Arunachala Spirit”, an account of the life, spiritual practice and seasons of this most holy of Hindu places.

Jane Phillipps, a British expert on horsemanship and eventing — right up there in the news now since the Queen’s granddaughter, Zara Phillips, became World Champion — will tackle “Horses & Events - Jane Phillipps on Horsemanship”.

So, if you travel by sea and horseback, trek in India, and eat a green diet, you’ll find plenty to chew on here at Syntagma.

For those waiting for the new “front page” of Syntagma’s Web Network Magazine, I can tell you it will now materialize on a new Syntagma domain, while this website will revert to being the company blog and my own personal jabberboard.

We were discussing who we would like blogging for us over a nibble and a tipple the other day, and I thought it might make a good post. So here’s my shot at it :

As a Web Network Magazine — as opposed to a “blog network” — we’d obviously be looking for people who gaze outward towards the mainstream, rather than obsessives locked into the echo-system of the unadulterated blogospheric geekhouse. No offence intended to those goodly souls.

One : Back when the Robert Scoble Departure story reverberated around the echo chamber, and even made the BBC, I offered Robert a berth here at Syntagma. He was very kind. He turned it down.

He then tried to poach Jason Calacanis from AOL to his modest startup podcast outfit. He’s obviously as attracted to the impossible as I am.

Jason, meanwhile, was trying to entice Amanda Congdon, who had just left Rocketboom. Lots of people try to entice Amanda Congdon.

Do you sense a circular movement going on here? An image of sharks in the ocean rises unbidden. Anyway, I’d still like to have Robert blogging for Syntagma in our geek section.

Why? Because of his unrepentant energy, which pours out on-the-button posts like a Maxim gun. That kind of “accurate” steam-power is hard to find, even in mainstream media.

Two : Mike Rundle. Mike is part of the 9rules net cluster and has interests which include Web design plus an awesome grasp of metrics and the underlying arts of the internet. He also “gets” what we’re trying to do here at Syntagma, as so many others don’t.

Three : Chris Pearson. A young Web designer who writes like a pro, designs like an angel (The Blog Herald and TLA), and has an eye on the print world, a sure sign of sanity.

Four : Seth Godin. I’ve read many of the critiques against him : narrowly-focused, academic, boringly marketing-centered etc. He has one overwhelming virtue though which flattens the carpers : the ability constantly to surprise and pluck purple cows from the air. Every Web Network Magazine needs a magician. Seth holds the wand for us.

Five : Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek Blogspotting is an old-hand print journalist who can write punchy and interesting blog posts, while simultaneously researching a cover story for BusinessWeek’s print magazine. In his spare time he’ll even toss you off a book about math(s). A great guy to have on the bridge in a squally sou’wester.

I could add more but I think that’s enough for one blog post. Any other ideas?

None of this constitutes an offer of a job. But my ears are always open to ideas from people we admire.

The ever-enterprising Darren Rowse has launched a new service for bloggers seeking blog jobs and blog owners looking for bloggers. It has just been launched as I write and already has a clutch of tasty openings for blog authors.

The opportunities are classified under : Corporate/Business, Blog Network, CoBlogging, Podcasting and Miscellaneous.

Darren writes: “This service would suit companies looking for bloggers, blog networks, individual bloggers looking for CoBloggers or even bloggers looking for medium to short term guest bloggers while they take a vacation.”

The cost of listing a job is normally $100 for 30 days, but there’s currently an opening special of $50 until September 5.

Syntagma has booked an ad for a sailing author — our endless quest — but it hasn’t appeared on the list yet. We’ll see if the Problogger magic can make the impossible doable.

Syntagma Media is looking for a new author for our PR5 Wordpress blog, Digital Camera Latest. The site already has a good number of posts, reviews, previews etc,. but I want to sharpen up its presentation and posting rate, and make it one of the top digicam information websites.

The blogger should have an excellent knowledge of digital cameras and direct experience of their use. Naturally, an ability to write engagingly about the subject is a must.

Please apply, with sample posts and relevant experience to: John(at)SyntagmaMedia(dot)com.

Update: We have now filled this vacancy. The site will be authored on a shared arrangement from next month.

As with most writers, the tools of the trade mean a lot to me. Over the years these tools have become so complicated it’s hard to keep track of them. The long journey from charcoal to software has been full of twists and turns and unexpected developments.

Since word processors were invented, pencils have seemed so outre. Even when typewriters first came on the scene, the humble wooden scribbler still had some meaning in life. Now, alas, this most simple of utilitarian inventions is regarded with disdain by most people. Except … some of us.

Ever since hearing that Henry David Thoreau didn’t live off a hill of beans while staying at Walden, I’ve thought of him as a pretty shrewd sort of guy. He was a man who wrote arguably the most successful book in history about surviving in the wilds.

Close inspection of his methods, though, reveals that he situated his “hut” just a mile or so from his home town of Concord, Mass., so that he could drop in on his friends for dinner, and even go home for weekends. Why do I find that so admirable?

Even more resourceful was his insistence on keeping the family pencil factory going while he struggled for sustinence in the woods. Why pencils? Well, he was a writer, and this was the middle of the 19th century, before typewriters came on the scene. In those days pencils were big business, and siting one close to sources of timber and charcoal was a surefire guarantee of success.

I mention all this as a preamble to an interesting blog I stumbled on during my increasing rare rounds of the blogosphere. It’s called The Pencil Revolution, and what it doesn’t know about pencils could be written on the end of a pencil. Thoreau would have loved this one.

Pencil Revolution

Syntagma Media is delighted to announce our new advertising website, AdsViral.com Beta.

It’s in Beta because it will eventually cover more ground and also offer advertising opportunities on other sites and even blog networks. At some stage we will employ fulltime ad-space sales staff to meet our growing needs and those of our partners.

If you would like to respond in any way to these activities and you are a player in the field, just contact me via the links given on the site or here on Syntagma.