Our designer, Thord Hedengren, writing in 901am, complains about the low value of the dollar. How would that affect him? Because like many people plying their trade on the internet he’s paid in dollars but lives outside the U.S.

He complains : “So I’m looking at my Paypal account and realize I won’t be moving any money anytime soon. The dollar’s down, has been for quite some time, and that means us non-US people make less for the same work.”

Currently, there are two dollars to every GB pound and, since a pound buys very roughly what a dollar buys in the States, it means we at Syntagma Media receive something like half the fee that an American company picks up, even when we are paid at the same rate.

Of course, it would work to our advantage if we were paid in sterling while our outgoings were designated in dollars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The internet is part of the dollar zone and will continue to be.

Thord goes on : “I lost equivalent of a grand (perhaps more when you read this, or less, depending on how the dollar moves compared to the Swedish crown) recently, just due to the dollar being down.”

Now I don’t know what the value of the Swedish Kroner is off-hand, but if it’s anything like the euro, he could be in an even worse situation than we British are.

The American economy is still chuntering along, despite a mammoth overseas trade deficit which is driving the dollar value down and making American goods and services cheaper for us abroad. This corrective mechanism clearly hasn’t gone far enough. Mostly this is due to Americans buying cheap Chinese goods — and who can blame them. The Chinese dollar surplus is then invested back into dollar assets on Wall Street. So the stock market moves up and cheap goods flood in. Everyone’s happy.

Except us worldwide writers and content providers who live in parts of Europe and get paid in dollars.

I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.

Syntagma readers may be interested in a review of the much-hyped UK Channel 4 documentary on the death of Princess Diana, which was broadcast last night. It raised many questions about press freedom and the so-called wisdom of crowds, beloved of social networkers and the Web 2.0 internet.

You can read it over on our sister site, Royal Anecdotes :

The C4 Diana Documentary Reviewed.

The Syntagma Story (continued)

Straws in the wind are important signals for digital farmers. They tell them crucially which way the wind is blowing, its strength, and something about the season/cycle.

There are now a lot of straws in the wind for digital networks (or, for purists, blog networks). BlogNetworkWatch no longer covers blog networks. It’s become a sort of mini Blog Herald. Many networks have shut up shop or are quietly getting on with their business underneath the radar.

So what is the state of the digital network business in these apparently doldrum conditions? As I’ve been writing here for a time, waiting for a knock on the door from the Business Development Officer of Yahoo/AOL/Google, whatever, is a sterile career move, and always was.

When Jason Calacanis announced Weblogs Inc was doing $1m a year on Adsense, followed quickly by its sale to AOL for $25m and a seat on the board, networks of content providers became the new Klondike. Lots of people moved in, including Weblog Empire (Duncan Riley) and b5media (Jeremy Wright and other names from the starry firmament). I worked for both before moving quickly on to form Syntagma Media.

Even then there were two ways you could play a digital network :

1. Build infrastucture and content platforms quickly so it stands out against the competition. Go for size and scale before anything else. Then, with a bit of luck, the BDO will come knocking on your humble door. Bingo! Blogging bliss.

2. Optimize the network for income — remember WIN was making $1m a year from Adsense alone before it sold out.

Here at Syntagma we followed Route 1, aiming always to reinvest income in exchange for size (55 sites and rising), and pushing the envelope into new fields, like network magazines and large retail portals. The business plan also included a move into IP-TV in 2008.

However, a major rethink has been forced on us through a number of events. Not the least is a lucrative publishing offer landing on my lap and, yes, straws in the wind. There are no big buyers of digital networks out there now, and even those that are sold have to settle for a bit upfront followed by a share in the income thereafter — in effect turning the owner into a salaryman of the buyer.

The really interesting point though, is that once you go from Route 1 and start exploring Route 2, something highly beneficial emerges. When you stop pouring all of your treasure into endless expansion, you discover that you can start paying yourself a handsome income just by running the network as a normal business, capping the size and scale, and going for quality and depth, rather than extension and constant revolution.

A network like Syntagma can easily pay its owner a six-figure salary (and rising) from a steady-as-she-goes policy of improvement and quality delivery. That assumes the business is around two-years old (we’re two in October) and has a bunch of mature inventory.

In the end, what you get out of a project is more important than prestige, size, or future bonanzas, real or imagined — try explaining it to your bank manager.

So that’s the subtle shift I’ve made in the running of Syntagma. From a network that, at its peak, employed 15 authors, with five vacancies outstanding, to a trim 30 to 40 sites with maybe six high-quality freelances working. We are now a medium-sized digital publisher aiming for depth and quality. One that pays its owner a decent salary, allowing him to spend time on the book deals.

I’m guessing that many network owners have already come to the same conclusion. It’s not astro science after all. If Route 1 seems like a distant dream, even a total mirage, then Route 2 holds some surprises in store. It’s the old bootstrapper’s adage that, the lower your costs, the less you have to turnover to get into the comfort zone. Syntagma is now officially a Route 2 business. Our motto is :

Mind you, if any BDOs are in the area, do drop into Syntagma Towers for a cup of tea. (The champagne has already been auctioned off).

Syntagma Digital is delighted to announce the launch of our fourth network magazine, Moneyizor, specializing in Finance and Business.

Designed by Thord Hedengren in his now familiar style, the portal will aggregate our money and business sites.

Two more sites will be launched in coming weeks as part of this package : Innovation Latest and Entrepreneur Latest.

As I’ve written many times here, the entrepreneur’s nightmare is to lose control of your business creation during the expansion process and then find yourself dumped by the incomers.

Whatever happened to Duncan Riley, for example? Now thriving at TechCrunch, he wouldn’t be a man you would want to lose in a hurry.

That is the cautionary tale of JPG Magazine, an online and print business that morphed into 80/20 publishing which resulted in disaster for its founders.

The story is told at some length by Derek Powazek, who describes himself as a thinker, designer, and writer in San Francisco.

His conclusions from the experience are :

If it’s any help to other entrepreneurs, here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Make no assumptions when it comes to roles and responsibilities. Like my dad says: “Someone’s gotta call quittin’ time.”
2. Communication between partners is mandatory. And you cannot communicate with someone who is not communicating with you.
3. Decisions aren’t decisions if you have to keep making them. Set on the course and stick to it. If you keep talking about things that have already been decided, nothing will ever get done.
4. When someone says one thing, but acts in a contradictory way, you have a choice between believing their words or believing their deeds. Believe their deeds.
5. Never let anyone tell you what you want. When someone says, “You don’t want that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want you to have that.”
6. Don’t stay where you’re not wanted, respected, or happy. Even if it’s your company.

That goes without saying, but it’s still worth reminding people that business is a tough environment unless you hold the best cards.

Are you getting tired of hearing the whining, depressive voices of the new prophets of doom? Listening to technologists, scientists, politicians, pundits and economists, you would think we were passing through a Dark Age.

The threat from China and India is seen as dire and growing. Climate Change threatens our entire civilization. Terrorism stands ready to murder the lot of us in our beds.

We terrorize our own children in schools by telling them that flood, fire and famine are just around the corner — unless, of course, they recycle their sweet wrappers and stay at home in the holidays.

We warn of catastrophic job losses because of a rampant China and a burgeoning India … and maybe Brazil too.

Jihadist Islam is plotting to turn the world into a gigantic Caliphate in which men will wear turbans and women will all but disappear beneath miles of black cloth.

These are the bad times, indeed.

What tommyrot. We’re being manipulated by neurotic, self-serving attention-seekers demanding that we all become just like them.

The Good Times
In fact, these are The Good Times. In the north, we’re entering a balmy period of clement weather similar to the Medieval Warming Period, which lasted hundreds of years. Then, we Brits could grow wine in the northern fastnesses of Northumberland.

In the Little Ice Age that followed, the River Thames through London froze over every winter. They were the bad times.

Soon Scottish Chardonnay will be on every menu, and bourgenvillea will grow wild all along the English Riviera from Lands End to the White Cliffs of Dover. In a few centuries another cooling period will begin and the price of fur and coal will rise. Make no mistake, these are the good times.

China and India are interacting with rich Western lifestyles with the only comparative advantage they have : cheap labour. They send us cheap goods which keep inflation low and increase the standards of living of the poor. This has the effect of driving us to become innovation societies, with highly educated and high-waged populations.

The new Tiger economies will reach that stage soon enough and things will return to normal. But, for now, these are the good times.

As for terrorism, no-one ever took over the world from a cave in Pakistan. In fact, in the UK we suffered far more casualties from the Irish Troubles in the 1970s and 80s than we have from Islamic terrorism. Our grandparents went through two world wars when countless millions were slaughtered and mankind went collectively insane.

Then they had the Cold War to put up with, and possible instant annihilation or slow death by radiation poisoning.

So, here we are : great weather to come for a couple of centuries, comparative peace, and endless cheap goods and gadgets from the wonderful Chinese and Indians.

THESE ARE THE GOOD TIMES.

Get used to it!

From today’s Times (London) :

Web 2.0 may be destroying civilisation. That, at least, is the view of Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley-based British entrepreneur and author. He has written The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (due out in June), which argues that the web is an anti-enlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says. “The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism, shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”

It’s an incredibly busy time for us here at Syntagma right now. What with new equipment to break in, upgraded systems for accounts, stats and other functions to test, we’ve also got the builders in. Today and tomorrow the floorboards are up in the office, so it’s difficult to get near the desktop computers.

Just the time for a big story to break on one of our main sites. Yesterday we had around 30,000 visitors to our Royal Anecdotes site off the back of the Kate Middleton story. Some newspapers have been shamelessly nicking our angles and distinctive points of view on this story. Anyone would think I’d used their stuff in the past. Ahem …

I sometimes wonder how I ever get time to post. Admin is such a huge drain on human resources in a multi-person content business. If it’s not lawyers, accountants, writers or partners eating valuable time, it’s the builders.

However, we should be back to normal by the weekend when we’ll be able to draw breath for the first time in a month.

Mind how you go.