I started writing a blog around four years ago. It was actually this very site, Syntagma, when it was a participant in the American tech blogosphere, probably the most developed and literate part of the blog scene.

Later, I moved away from a precise blog format and began concentrating on finance worldwide, then British politics.

In the early days, the tech blogosphere was dominated by techmeme.com, an aggregator site that pushes posts up the ladder of a river of news depending on the number and importance of the links coming into them.

Techmeme monitored 1000 sites then, including Syntagma, so we often appeared in the list.

Occasionally a massive squabble broke out involving A-list tech bloggers, like Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and others. I quickly learnt that this was deliberate “link baiting”, a process that drags in links, and traffic, from everyone trying to jump on the bandwagon. The idea was to get Google-juice, which pushed up your PageRank and thus earned you more search traffic.

These blogs could not charge for their often high-quality material, so they depended on Google’s Adsense “pay-per-click” advertising system, and some affiliate programs, to finance the work. It explains the rather shrill tone of the blogosphere, compared with the stately progress of broadsheet newspapers.

As I’ve only joined the British political website scene in the past year or so, I’m aware of how small it is compared to the US tech and political blogospheres.

The left is waywardly adrift in the bracing, freedom-loving air of the blog frontier. The likes of Derek Draper perceive it as an opportunity to smear, close down, and generally harry anyone who disagrees with them. They are totally out of kilter with both the potential and the netiquette of the medium.

John Prescott’s humour, and ability to laugh at himself, stands him out as a possible survivor. A few others on the left “get it”, but not many.

Some blogs are read because they are snarky and rude, but the material reflects the readership. The best are cool, informative and as accurate as it’s possible to be writing from a small office or bedroom outside Westminster. Some bloggers have journalistic or other writing backgrounds — they tend to be the best.

Is small beautiful? It’s different, and if done with a deft touch, makes a good contribution to politics in Britain.

I’m not one of those people who thinks blogs will destroy national newspapers — they are all online in any case. Nor do I think the nationals are so superior they will easily swat away the gadflies of small-time blogs.

I have enough tree-rings in the trunk to view the predicted loss of national newspapers with dismay. I couldn’t imagine waking up without the morning papers. Besides, reading everything online is bad for the eyesight. I’ve known a few bloggers who have developed serious eye problems.

Blogs are getting better all the time. Some academic, business and technical blogs provide sober, accurate material of a quality and relevance not found elsewhere. Like choosing your daily paper, it’s a matter of personal selection.

My guess is that as news migrates online, it will become terser and briefer, mobile oriented. Twitter is a sign of the times. Commentary, op-eds and personal opinions are ideal for high-quality blogs, which need to establish an audience through relevance and readability. Most of them will also need to make money, which is not easy.

The question at the top of this piece is: Will bloggers bring down Gordon Brown? Guido’s emails were sent to Sunday papers where they made a much bigger splash than on his blog.

They triggered an almost unprecedented tide of disgust from commentators on the left. Senior Labour people are also weighing in.

Brown must feel beleaguered in his Downing Street bunker. One can imagine even Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell silently going to ground as Brown has done on many occasions in the past.

The weight of all this approbrium will surely convince him of two things: one, he can’t win the next election and, two, waiting around for it to happen is not worth the strain to himself and his family.

If he does go, the history books will record that Paul Staines, the blogger at Guido Fawkes website, set the ball rolling. It will be a major scalp for blogging and online writers in the field.

John Evans

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The disturbing story of the very young Australian boy feeding small zoo animals to larger ones, raises all kinds of questions and parallels.

In the past year more than 20 teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling parents, police, experts and the authorities.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and some with the virtual world of Second Life.

Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers.

Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

John Evans

Some phrases in the English language become very annoying after a while.

They begin as cute, even devastating, responses to awkward situations. The purpose of them is to confer a powerful air of superiority on the user.

One such phrase is: “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?”

All such sayings start life as carefully crafted one-liners by wags in the press, usually half-decent writers, or cerebral contributors to those erudite TV panel shows. An osmotic process ensures they are swiftly deployed by every journalist, editor and media performer in the land.

Then, following a brief moment of triumph, they fade away, almost as quickly as they appeared. They have turned into cliche, and real writers know they are now virtually unusable … by them, at least.

But that’s not the end of it. Ordinary, non-media people pick them up as smart things to say when pressed. Endless TV vox pop interviews — popular because they don’t have to be paid for — are now filled with the dreaded words: “What part of ‘No’ don’t they understand?”

The Irish “No” vote in the EU referendum on Friday has resurrected this tired old bit of phraseology. It’s all over the newspapers again. Even hoary TV commmentators are using it — usually as a quote from someone else to give themselves deniability. The WPONDYU challenge is having its day in the sun.

Have we at Syntagma ever used it? Once or twice a moon or two ago. The problem with it is that it’s rather authoritarian. If someone barks it at you, you’ll know what I mean. It conjures up a particularly abusive school master or a militant feminist responding to an idle pass.

As a public service I have carefully crafted a witty response to What part of “No” don’t you understand? Here it is:

“It’s the ‘N’ that puzzles me. It gets it off to a very poor start.”

Okay, it’s not Oscar Wilde, but then I have nothing to declare but my lack of genius.

A few people have asked me what I mean by “Mediate Yourself” — see previous post.

Most of us are almost totally mediated by “the media”. We obtain our views, much of our knowledge, and virtually all of our obsessions from these rich sources.

The result is a kind of addiction by which we become dependent on being fed experiences we should be getting from real life. The media’s lack of actuality is its unique selling point. It allows us to stand back from life’s messier aspects, while getting a taste of them via the media. The blackside is that this lack of actuality means young people don’t learn the lessons of bad decisions, like criminality and violence, until it’s too late.

The obvious question then arises: who mediates the media? The answer is, in almost all cases, the zealots.

Zealots have a long history. You may remember them from the New Testament, or any other ancient and modern text. Whatever the purpose, there is always zealotry in the background. Smart readers may quickly spot that these very texts were often written by other zealots masquerading as friends of humanity. Who else but zealots would go to all that trouble?

Far from history being driven by “the economy, stupid”, as the Marxist zealots insist, it is in fact powered by all manner of zealousness. Jihadist zealotry, for example, is not conspicuously driven by money.

Now, there is nothing wrong with some elements of zeal per se. Without enthusiasm there would be no progress, and probably no fun either. But we must distinguish between zealotry and enthusiasm. The latter is harmless, the former has an unbreakable intent and a belief in their mental construct, often the fashionable assumptions of the age.

Since the media — especially television — will not tolerate anyone who is dull or uninteresting, the zealots have a head start in the race to be media performers, and even controllers of the pipes.

So we are mediated by the media, which in turn is mediated by various species of zealot.

That brings us on to what a zealot does and why zealotry is bad for us.

Zealots take hold of the unmediated, infinitely variable, analog nature of existence and pull out a range of simplistic propositions, like magicians with a hat, which, they say, represent the truth of the world. Being zealots, any opposition will not be tolerated.

For example, the present Western zealotry can be summed up in a few words and phrases: “carbon footprint”, “sustainability”, “global warming”, “climate change”. The drama of disaster movies is their weapon of choice. Fear is their stock in trade. Mediocrity and conformity the result.

Zealots of the Roman Empire turned the practical and spiritual Jesus story into the all-pervasive controlling orthodoxy of the Middle Ages — the first real totalitarianism. That zeal is still with us and has spread to other religions. Thus religion has become the possession of zealots the world over.

In politics, the “natural philosophy” of Edmund Burke, which once characterized England and the common law countries, has been transformed into the iron-girder prescriptiveness of “human rights” and the equality agenda, among many other humanmade straitjackets we have to tolerate. These are vigorously underpinned by the tyranny of statute law and various “international” institutions notorious for their bleak influence and ineffectiveness.

Zealots rule. They mediate us from their positions in the media, religion, politics, education and much of current discourse. Of course, truth eventually surfaces again, but there’s no respite. They are quickly replaced by counter-zealots who deliver fresh dollops of anxiety and suspicion.

There is no such thing as a sustainable zealotry. They last just long enough to do their damage before being overtaken by other merchants of zeal. Worse, many hide their sense of entitlement behind a benevolent front.

In the age of an overwhelmingly powerful media, we must learn to mediate ourselves or become the slaves of zealotry and mediocrity. Or might that be “mediacrity”?

Mediate Yourself — Stand Out From The Crowd, by John Evans, will be published within the next 12 months.

Syntagma’s designer, freelance Thord Hedengren — he designed this site and all our others — has been appointed editor of the Blog Herald by its owners, Splashpress Media.

He follows blog superstar Tony Hung, who also happens to be a medical doctor, so we can assume his time is at a premium.

The BH was started way back in 2003 by Duncan Riley, now at TechCrunch. In blog terms 2003 is the equivalent of 1903 for a print newspaper.

Thord also blogs on his own network in Sweden and on his site, tdhedengren.com. I’ve found him to have a detailed knowledge of the current internet scene, plus gossip and tech news around the blogosphere.

We wish Thord great success in his new gig. The Blog Herald, like all new media outlets, needs to stay fresh and vital with a stream of lively, world-class content.

With TDH at the helm it’s off to a flying restart.

In recent months seventeen teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling the nation.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers. Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

I’ve just noticed that Techmeme has got a PR4. The site probably has hundreds of thousands of links in its archives. Its business is to link readers to the most relevant and authoritative technology news around the world.

Why doesn’t the new Google algorithm distinguish between that model and paid linkage? So far as I’m aware inclusion in the body of Techmeme is not based on any monetary transfer. Syntagma is often included and no payment is asked.

The only exceptions are the webclips from posts of Techmeme’s sponsor sites. Do they count as text link ads too? If so, Google is now attacking the basis of the citation system it set up in its early years and is ominously beginning to confirm a suspected lack of tolerance of any online monetizing scheme other than its own.

We sometimes forget that Google is a business like any other. To own both the largest search engine and the most extensive advertising program on the internet must offer great temptations for muscle flexing to its management.

However, the use of monopoly powers is always counter-productive in the end. Without keen competition a company quickly loses force in the marketplace and the respect of its customers.

One wonders how far this downgrading process will go. There are hints that the company miscalculated this move and is having to put back rankings to many sites. Not here yet though.

So what is the new gold standard? What now counts as a penalizable link in the Google dispensation? In the age of information, the facts of this case are not easy to come by.

This is the third and final segment of a recent interview I gave to Gerry Reynolds, a retail analyst, and which is published in Syntagma with permission. Read the other two parts here : #

Gerry : I’d like now to look in more detail at the essence of the business, its income, i.e. advertising. What are the main parameters of online advertising?

John : Online advertising is relatively new, so it still has more than a shade of the Wild West about it. It’s improving all the time, though, and growing very fast.

For small publishers, the breakthrough was Google’s Adsense, which is a text-based system aimed at generating clickthroughs, which in turn produce income linked to the market price of certain keywords sold by auction as “Adwords”. You can see examples of Adsense at the foot of each of the first three posts on any of our sites.

If that sounds complicated, it boils down to “pay-per-click” instead of pay-per-sale. The pay you get per click varies from a few cents to more than $10, depending on the product or service involved.

If you think of Adsense as plain old classified ads with an electronic counter attached, you’ll get the point.

Gerry : But Adsense is going out of favour now, isn’t it?

John : You do need high trafficked sites for it to work, which is why it’s the darling of the Google gamers, the SEO wizards who seed their sites with high-priced keywords to generate traffic and clickthroughs.

Most decent blogs will have traffic of between 10,000 and 50,000 page views a month. That’s not enough to make useful gains from Adsense. Significantly, though, it’s enough to generate hundreds of dollars a month from “text-link ads” which are paid for in advance by actual advertisers. There are now agencies which sell the ads for you and take a 50 percent cut for their pains.

Gerry : Does Syntagma use these agencies?

John : We do, but we also sell our own text-links off our inventory. They tend to give better value to the advertisers because we can be flexible with discounts, especially where a lot of space is available.

Gerry : So text links are the most important form of advertising for you?

John : In our first two years, they have been. The cumulative income from hundreds of text links over 40 to 50 sites, can be very impressive indeed, especially compared with affiliate shareouts, which depend on sales, and CPM ads which give small sums for each ad impression.

Gerry : What other systems have you tried?

John : I’ve tried them all. On high traffic sites, Adsense and affiliate links do well, because they are a numbers game. But the bulk of sites will be below, say, 100,000 page views a month. These need to be monetized in a different way to bring home the bacon. However, if these sites are in the right topic areas, they can generate good monthly incomes from text links.

Gerry : What are the right topic areas?

John : Click through our inventory contents list in the sidebar of Syntagma and you’ll see those that sell out on text link ads positioned below the header.

Gerry : So anyone can do this?

John : In theory, but not quite. Many “blog” networks have closed because the owners didn’t have the stamina to see the job through. Syntagma has a good reputation in the space, which we’ve earned over two years, and is seen as a mature player. That attracts advertisers to us.

In our first year, income was sparse and I funded the operation from my credit card. In the second year, when I had learned the lessons of profilgacy, oneupmanship and other money-draining practices, I slimmed the whole shebang down to an optimum size and reach, which now makes money.

I don’t want to beat my own drum, but it does take tenacity and a great deal of shrewdness to stay in the game when you’re losing funds every day. The secret is to stay in the mainstream in terms of market niches, but to do it differently from everybody else, so you stay ahead of the crowd.

Gerry : You don’t mind giving your secrets away?

John : I’m always glad to help anyone who’s starting out or who is currently not succeeding. There’s enough money in online business for everyone who wants to claim it. Each success story expands the envelope. It’s not a finite pot. It’s a very dynamic marketplace, and we’re all pioneers here.

Gerry : What are the other forms of advertising that you may use in your third year?

John : I’m always experimenting, sometimes below the radar and on sites not part of our list.

Sponsorship of sites by substantial corporations is a possibility, and I’ve had talks with a few such players. Also, Google is developing an ad network with the aim of filling neglected inventory all around the internet with their ads. It’s a great concept, especially if it gets away from the necessity of hosting dedicated ad serving software, which is a nightmare for relatively small operations. That’s the Next Big Thing in the space, and all the other majors are following suit right now.

Gerry : You seem to have an aversion to spending one penny more than you have to on anything.

John : I operate a “blood from stone” policy. In a low margin business, you need to find the sweet spot where profits are generated from minimum costs. So far, I’ve been successful in this. I don’t intend to overreach the limits imposed by basic cash-flow techniques, nor make assumptions that I can’t nail down.

Syntagma’s motto is Dr Johnson’s phrase : “Example is more efficacious than precept”. Which can be translated as “successful actions speak louder than words”, or “A warehouse full of bacon is a better investment than a forestful of wild boar”.

Gerry : What about subscription models of funding?

John : They have been tried, mostly on crack information sites, and usually with disastrous results. The New York Times is coming off a part-sub model right now, and so are many other newspaper titles.

People expect their online experience to be free, for the simple reason that when they click away from a page there’s nothing left, unlike with a newspaper or magazine. It’s fairly simple psychology. That’s why we sell the fleeting use of their eyeballs. There’s nothing else to sell online that has real value.

Gerry : I love that, “the fleeting use of their eyeballs”. Are people aware of what you’re doing to them?

John : Good God, no. Everyone’s very protective of their eyeballs. If they thought we were renting them out, they’d shoot us.

Gerry : And so on to year three.

John : From October 20, yes.

Gerry : Is it going to be a good ‘un?

John : The best so far, undoubtedly, but the words “chickens” and “hatched” loom large in my consciousness.

Gerry : As ever!

John : As ever and a day.

Search9Media is an entirely Irish blog network that has just opened up in Dublin. #

From the list of sites already up it’s clearly dedicated to Irish and local concerns. For example, Irish Jobs, Football, Shoes, DVDs, Bags, Bridal, Gadgets, Mobile etcetera. It’s just the kind of product based network that does really well on advertising, and being local will give it an instant leg-up with Irish internet users.

They are looking for bloggers right now — presumably with a touch of the blarney about their blogging. Here’s what they say about themselves :

I’m very happy to say that Search9Media is open for business! For the past few weeks we have been busy getting our network of websites up and running.

Search9Media is a Dublin based Blog Network (we think the first to launch in Ireland). We’ll be producing quality based content on a number of subjects by extremely talented writers.

We’ll be looking for bloggers in the next few days so make sure you check back if you are interested in writing for Search9Media.

Syntagma wishes Colm and the team great success with Search9Media : #