Syntagma Media has finally launched a sailing website : Windjammer — Discovering Sailing, authored by Douglas Green, who also writes our Green Gardening site.

Douglas describes his virtual voyage on the Syntagma Ship o’ the Line thusly :

“My sailing area is one of the best in the fresh-water sailing world. The eastern end of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River 1000 islands sailing region houses some of the best racing and cruising you can imagine. There’s a long and storied history of sailing down here and I can only marvel at some of the stories.

“I’ll also be writing about other things I love in the sailing world. Like travelling south (Hey, I live in Canada — it’s really, really hard to take a Folkboat out on frozen water) and seeing some of the museums and sailing adventures down there.”

Sounds like one to steer for if you’re an Old Salt or would-be Master Mariner.

Syntagma Media is tickled pink green to announce our first website firmly embedded in the soil.

Green Gardening with Douglas Green (even the name fits) is all about … well, Douglas tells it better than I can :

Blogs are fun things — you can write what suits you and publish it right away - post pictures and generally share interesting bits of information with other gardeners.

I’ve been doing this sharing in various ways for most of my gardening life. Both in my own nursery where I used to run seminars and through my radio, television and writing work. The Internet simply lets us write in a more direct way to our readers.

Now I’m a full time garden writer — working on a wide range of magazine, book and Internet writing — that is when I’m not out building new gardens and trialing new plants. (My kids have a case of beer bet on how long it will take me to completely remove all the grass from the front lawn) .

This blog is about new plants, new environmentally sound techniques and almost anything that crosses my desk or grows in my garden that I’d like to share with you.

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.

This is my answer to Matt Craven’s Blog Herald podcast in which he touches on Syntagma’s rebadging as a Web Network Magazine.

So, what *is* the internet for? Is it a giant train set for geeks to play with? Is it simply another publishing tool for publishing folk? The answer is both, of course. The problem lies in the interface between the two.

The question that Matt brings up yet again — naturally — is, what is a blog network? Subsidiary questions that arise here include, should a blog network confine itself to the blogosphere? ; are hybrid models acceptable? (to whom?) ; and can a blog network transform itself so that it becomes something else?

The answers must be either : No, Yes and Yes, or we live in a police state.

Generally there are two kinds of user in the professional/commercial blogosphere. Those whose business (or main interest) is the internet itself : the hardware, the software, the services, and something called Web 2.0.

The other users are essentially publishers. They don’t care much about the platform — they pay others to worry about that — but their business uses the internet as a publishing tool without obsessing, or even knowing much, about it.

The former will have businesses beginning with Blog- or The Blog XXXXXX. Words like blogosphere and blog network loom large in their daily round.

The latter will have businesses that draw on words like media, publishing, magazine. In some senses they are the future of the internet, because the original geek base which created it is getting smaller by the hour in proportion to the whole (as Duncan Riley pointed out last year).

When a blog network starts up it’s usually driven by the tech set. Weblogs Inc was started by technology watchers and technologists, while b5media has a systems engineer as CEO, and three other directors whose sole concern is working in, consulting on, and writing about, the internet, especially the blogosphere.

Now that’s perfectly fine. Who else would start a blog network apart from people who had some interest in the platform? The problem comes though at the next stage of development (see my earlier post on this). A blog network is essentially a hybrid beast developing within the techy world of open-source software, but reaching out to the world of publishing generally.

Consequently, any network that doesn’t make the transition from serverside to general readership is doomed to remain an incestuous half-formed creature feeding off its own offal.

A blog network must develop a personality in the way a magazine does. Without a bonding element and a common thread it’s just an incoherent link farm of bits and pieces. Numbers don’t count here, it’s the whole package, its brand and cohesion that form the public face of its product.

Then it has to have quality content of a high professional standard that non-blogospherics want to read. You can serve geeks only, of course — TechCrunch is a fine example — but how many TechCrunches can the market bear? TechCrunch is a big fish in shallow waters.

For a blog network to take root it has to transform itself into something recognizable to a much wider audience, a magazine, for instance. The CEO and others have to leave their technology past behind and become publishers, with all the traditional skills that publishers have. Otherwise they will suddenly hit a wall where their arts are no longer good enough for the next stage up.

Syntagma Media’s conversion from a blog network to a Web Network Magazine was inevitable at some stage. We’ve done it sooner than most, that’s all. Coincidentally, its CE (yours truly) was an author and publisher in a previous pre-blogosphere existence.

I predict many of the others will follow us down this route in time. If they don’t, they’re doomed.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

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.

Many thanks for the responses to the launch of our AdsViral.com beta website, and for those who emailed me. We will be improving and extending the site as time marches on.

Although many of the responses concentrated on the viral advertising we offer, the site leads with more conventional advertising models.

Companies who are already taking advantage of Syntagma Media’s wide and varied inventory include:

Shopzilla
Office World
Sholar Group Architects
Equifax
BizRate
Office Depot
Shopping.com
PopCrunch.com
Bizinessnews.com
The Melancton Directory
ProactionMedia.com
AdviceOnline.co.uk
MostChoiceRealEstate.com
1Carinsurance.org
SerenataFlowers.com
AtomicPark.com
SecureMyCompany.com
ProFlowers.com
LifeInsuranceChoice.com
PartSelect.com
FuturesGroup.com
ColdHeat.com
PhotoJewelryMaking.com
CertainSight.com
MoonWhisper.com
… and many more.

Thanks to all of them.

Drop us a line for more details to: ads(at)SyntagmaMedia(dot)com.

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.