When I started writing about our network magazine project, it was greeted with some disbelief in the publishing netosphere. Now that the roll-out is nearly complete, folk are realizing that we really do mean business here at Syntagma.

So, being mildly provocative again — and as it’s Sunday — here’s a list of our projects going forward as far as 2009, including the till-now ultra-secret iSyntagma.

Network Magazines
We have created the portals for our three initial network magazines, Allusionz, LifeTimes and 21st-century Phi, and are now adding four new Thord Hedengren designs to all of our 50 sites. We’ve completed a quarter of them, the rest will follow over the next two weeks.

We’ve also embarked on the final step in the process, which is to aggregate our stats-capture by magazine, in addition to by individual site. The reason is that from now our advertising will be sold per network mag rather than by webtitle.

In other words, we’re moving away from 10,000 page-view pitches to a composite pitch for 20 or so similar and related webtitles. This bridges the gap between offering single sites to advertisers, or the whole inventory, which is so diverse only the most general buyers would be interested.

We’ll still carry our classified ads at the top of the posts (see here), and on a per site basis, since we’re looking for $200-$500 a month per webtitle for this space and the classifieds are running ahead of any alternatives at the present time.

Our business plan specified six network magazines by October 2007 — our second anniversary. Since our two shopping portals have been put on hold (see below), I expect we’ll now have four working network magazine titles by October.

Shopping Portals
I wrote a bit about this here a day or two ago, specifically the glass ceiling we encounted when trying to break into the big-ad retail markets in North America and the UK.

Our two shopping portals : Retailz USA and ShopShape UK required much more input than our current strength allowed when relying on own-resources. Talks with possible partners fell down because they were all stronger than we were, and inevitably had their own ideas on how it should be done.

I’m not temperamentally suited to being a junior partner in anything, so we’ve put these projects back until we have sufficient internal strength to be at least the major determiner in the project. The portals are now scheduled for late 2008 or spring 2009.

Dial Publishing
Dial Publishing was my first attempt at being an independent print publisher. It concentrated on educational books and courses, and was successful until the market went pear-shaped (see here for more details).

Now it’s being refurbished as the print arm of Syntagma Media, and will publish its first titles in the second half of this year. Two to watch are, The Syntagma Story, and Superdemocracy – The Art of Corporate Governance, both by yours truly. They will be followed by other titles by other authors.

iSyntagma
Now we come to our biggest project of all, the top secret iSyntagma, which we’ve been researching and working on for a while under a cloak of invisibility. If you go to isyntagma.com you’ll just see an untouched Wordpress Kubrick shell. Amazingly it has a PR of 4.

To prove that my forthcoming book, The Syntagma Story is really going to be worth reading, I’ve decided to spill the beans on this rocking more-than-an-aspiration-more-an-inspiration projectile.

We’ve decided to vault over the podcasting scene completely — too much like blogging, too many amateurs, and too primitive compared with what’s on offer by the broadcasters. And it will never show a profit.

Instead, iSyntagma will launch … trumpets and drum roll … Thank you, orchestra, a bit louder next time. Will launch :

Syntagma Television will be an internet TV channel, broadcasting live TV and video from the West Country of England to a select few, niche audiences, among which will be the tech crowd. It’s a serious project and is well underway.

Just log on to SyntagmaTV.com or SyntagmaTelevision.com sometime in 2008 and we’ll be beaming at you wherever you are.

As a Bob Cringely reader I know of the current bandwidth problems, but also how Google among others are working on the solutions. If 2007 is the year the net collapses under the weight of video downloads (Bit Torrent currently takes more than 50pc of bandwidth resources), 2008 will see new opportunities emerge, and Syntagma Television will be unveiled in that more temperate climate.

Again, we’re going to try to do this within own-resources. If you’ve got a million bucks to invest, do not offer it to us — I might be tempted.

So there you have it. Our future starkly portrayed in all its impossible glory. One thing you should know : we revel in the impossible.

Syntagma Digital is delighted to unveil the latest webtitle in our 21st-century Phi network magazine. It is Global Warming Latest, a sceptical/skeptical look at all things climate change.

The author of the site is Andrea Paulsen, who takes a keen interest in global warming and the blood-curdling pronouncements of scientific opinion. She agrees that this is a hugely interesting area of research, but that all is not always what it seems.

Anyway, I’ve had my say here in Syntagma, so it’s over to Andrea for a more forensic, in-depth coverage of this fascinating subject.

Read Global Warming Latest.

Syntagma Digital’s new 21st-century Phi template has been unveiled on our Formula 1 Latest webtitle.

Designed as always by Thord Hedengren, Phi is the last theme to be launched in our new styling round.

We will be unrolling the four themes across the Syntagma network over the new week or two.

See Phi at F1 Latest here.

We have been preparing for our ultimate incorporation for some months, pausing only to ensure we have the right balance of elements and sufficient profitability to sustain a much larger operation. However, with our new design currently in hand by Thord Hedengen, it seemed the right moment to declare our new structure, which will be progressively implemented in the second quarter of the year.

Syntagma Media will split into two operating divisions. The first, Syntagma Digital, will contain all our online properties — some 53 websites — including, three network magazines and the (currently) top secret plans codenamed, iSyntagma.

The second new division of Syntagma Media is named Dial Publishing and will handle all print and other offline publishing and consulting work. This side of the business is set to swing into action in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

It always amazes me the amount of work involved in changing even the smallest sliver of a fully-functioning business, so we do this sparingly at all times.

But the time has come to launch : Syntagma Digital.

We are about to unveil our long-awaited new design for the Syntagma network, following on from the launch of our three network magazine portals late last year.

Thord Hedengren, who designed the portals, is also producing our new network look. The idea is to carry a similarity of design features from portal to site, creating a distinctive Syntagma style. As a network that started out on the Wal-Mart principle of “pile ‘em in ‘n’ stack ‘em high”, this will be a major departure for us.

But then, Petticoat Lane to Bond Street was always our secret trajectory.

We’re getting a draft of the designwork this week, so it shouldn’t be too long before Syntagma joins the fashionistas at the top of the style league.

Watch this spice [sic].

I’ve sometimes thought that Google’s great project of delineating and mapping the entire internet was time-limited and would some day explode in its face.

The fact is, no matter how much they expand their datacenter infrastructure with cheap Dell computers, the number of pages on the net will grow faster — probably exponentially faster. The question now exercising us is : has the process of melt-down begun?

A few days back I wrote about the current PR regrade and described it as “weird”. Many of our Wordpress sites have remained untouched at PR0 despite clocking around 500 backlinks on Google’s own link: operator. Other, very successful sites have lost PR for no apparent reason.

At first I thought we were being penalized for some factor hidden away below the radar. But others are complaining too, including The Blog Herald and some SEO experts.

I won’t repeat the two examples I gave before, but take our three magazine portals. The first launched, Allusionz, has many more backlinks than the second, Phi. Both sites have been ignored. However, the last site launched, LifeTimes, with fewer backlinks, has been given a 4.

I could go on. Frankly a system with this number of anomalies is worse than useless, it’s positively harmful. Content businesses need to plan ahead. If a crucial metric goes haywire it makes it much more difficult. Better that Google admits it’s overwhelmed and either sorts the system out or withdraws the PageRank measure altogether.

So I ask again, has Google botched this regrade, or has the famed algorithm become so overworked it no longer functions logically?

Has Google suffered melt-down at last?

If you’re interested in practical paths to Enlightenment, you should head over to our Spiritual Nirvana site, where a new series on Zen masters is kicking off with Bankei, a 17th-century master who, in his day, enjoyed the status of a rock star.

We’ll be serializing biographies of the major, early masters by John M Evans — yours truly — over the next few weeks, each in six or so parts. The first three on Bankei are up, so go and take a look.

I was going to say, “Not to be missed”, but then remembered I wrote it, so I’ll make do with “Catch it if you can”.

Start reading here.

Lots of juicy chatter around the zlogosphere* about portals and platforms right now. Even Dave Winer is confused so it’s got to be getting serious.

* zlogs are blogs that have outgrown the common or garden blogosphere.

Keith Teare at edgio thinks the big portals, like Yahoo and Google, will gradually retract back from their Himalayan heights to the great wodge in the middle, while the outer edge, comprising small to medium publishers, will become relatively more important. His touchstone is the reported $180,000/month made by TechCrunch.

Scott Karp, who wrote something similar a week ago, believes platforms are the new portals.

Well, it’s old ground here in the zlogosphere as I’ve been banging on about content platforms for quite a while. Mathew Ingram questions the terms used in this discussion. “It’s just the language that is making things difficult. What is a ‘gateway’ or a ‘portal’ or a ‘platform?’ ”

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s Zyntagma Syntagma’s definition of a content platform — or network magazine, as we call them : “A network magazine is a content platform that brings together a range of websites on multi-domains from the same network and which are of interest to a similar readership.”

So the platform is the total distributed inventory within the unit, defined and networked as a magazine, or some other term. The portal is the place where it’s promoted as a single entity. The platform is the whole, the portal is the front page and contents list, to use print terminology.

To clarify that, we have three content platforms and three portals where they receive their organization and package branding.

Scott’s suggested receipts of $180,000/month per platform would give us an annual income of $6.5 million.

Long live the zlogosphere.

We’ve now completed our reorganization plans and will be implementing them across our three network magazines this weekend.

Basically, we are archiving some underperforming sites and we’ve let go eight wonderful one-site authors. This was a difficult decision, but they used up as much admin time as those with many more sites under their belts. With reducing the workload as the main objective, this was painful but necessary.

We have now stabilized to around 35 sites, plus the experimental ones under Syntagma Confidential. With my new contract there’s a distinct possibility of the big retail project going ahead under a different banner, and that will impact favourably on Syntagma too.

We’re now leaner, better organized and much more profitable than before. At the end of my one-year contract with a much larger outfit, Syntagma will be the best li’l network business on the Web.

You’d better believe it.