Announcing my new book, Mediate Yourself - Stand Out From The Crowd, targeted for pre-Christmas publication.

The title more or less explains what the book is about, but not why it has now taken primary place above two others I’ve been working on for a while.

Superdemocray - A New Art Of Corporate Governance was always a long-term project and is slowly falling into place.

Cosmosity - The Natural History of Nirvana was almost finished when an Indian author nicked the main title, and someone else “borrowed” the principal theme. Writing an online running commentary on a work-in-progress is not always a good idea. This book has been put on the shelf pending a complete rewrite.

However, Mediate Yourself has been quietly writing itself for some months and exists in multifarious pieces widely distributed on many sites and blogs. It would be impossible for any literary pickpocket to find them and piece them together into a coherent whole.

In fact, so much progress has been made beneath the radar that I’m able to announce it now without fear of exact plagiarism.

The domains, mediateyourself.com and .org were also available, which is always a good sign. The site will go up within shouting distance of publication.

The only decision still to make is whether the subtitle should be “stand out from the cloud”, instead of “crowd”. The first is more colourful and unexpected, while the second has more precision.

The New York Times has a rather gloomy piece on how bloggers are dropping dead like flies, apparently overcome by the strains of the 24/7 global internet culture.

Personally, I’ve not known a blogger who has slumped lifeless over a keyboard (touch wood). I imagine people pass away at inconvenient moments in many professions. Blogging and writing from home must have its share of dicky tickers like any other walk of life.

However, the NYT has chapter and verse :

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

From these few examples you would have to subtract the number of deaths and heart attacks in the general population to arrive at a guesstimate of internet publishing’s real rate of attrition.

No doubt there are serious stresses and strains working in the new online environment. However, a word of caution. Anyone who has worked for newspapers to tight daily deadlines will recognize the same pressures and symptoms. Journalists are not notorious for their alcohol consumption for nothing.

And try slaving in a factory, repetitively doing the same tasks thousands of times a day. Or surviving the water-cooler politics of office life. Worse, the back-breaking toil of farm work. There are no easy options in “the world of work”.

Methinks the problem lies, as ever, with meetings, travel, networking and other inconsequentials of the wired-up sector. Networking for the internetizen means Twittering and Tweeting incoherently to hundreds, maybe thousands, of “followers”, mostly without a shred of benefit to the bottom line. Email is another source of stress and should be stamped on ruthlessly, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote a day or two ago.

The Times has this quote from him, “‘I haven’t died yet,’ said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. ‘At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,’ he said.”

Syntagma’s advice : drop the Tweets, do the paid work efficiently — a three-hour morning should suffice — then get out of the house on a long Photowalk, or maybe to the golf course or coffee shop (preferably without a Hotspot), and forget about the Labours of Hercules. He was a mythical character and is not one to emulate.

This morning I received a couple of comments on two old posts dating back to October 2005 and July 2006. Both posts have been popular for comments and email conversations. Neither is on topic — which are, Tech, Media, Publishing — and would fall into the very ample category of self-indulgence.

The first is, Hey, I’m a Viking, which tells how I discovered that I’m … erm … a Viking. It seems I have the genetic configuration called Baron Dupuytren’s disease, or Viking Finger. Here’s a snippet :

“This weekend I discovered I’m a Viking. … Yes, I’m one of those horn-headed, axe-wielding types who terrorized Europe for centuries. Before you run for cover, I’m not about to go on a spreadeagling spree or demand you pay me Danegeld — although that might not be a bad idea.

“I realized I’ve got Viking blood — as many in the British Isles have — because of a minor medical condition which affects the small finger tendon in the palm of a hand. This progressive condition pulls the small finger gradually across the palm, giving a rather gnarled, even romantic, impression to the onlooker. The figure of Captain Hook springs to mind. ”

The second, is about an obscure Cornish author called Crosbie Garstin, now utterly forgotten, even in Cornwall. Yet, he wrote a major Hollywood film, China Seas (1935), which starred Clark Gable, plus a memorable trilogy about the Penhales family. Here’s a taster :

“Crosbie Garstin is best known for his trilogy of novels about the Penhales family, published before the last war by Heinemann. The Owls’ House, High Noon and The West Wind are all cracking adventures set in Cornwall and on the high seas in the days of sail. China Seas, his last book, continued the genre, and was made into a Hollywood film starring Clark Gable. Garstin was an interesting character, a true adventurer and traveller. He served during the first world war in King Edward’s Horse and was commissioned on the battlefield in 1915.”

It always intrigues me why some posts attract comments long after they were published. Clearly, these two contain specific keywords that are regularly searched for on Google and other engines. Syntagma is number 1 on Google for both “crosbie garstin” and “viking finger”.

So doctors searching for medical information on Baron Dupuytren’s disease will land on our silly post. Let’s hope they don’t kill anyone with an axe.

It’s 2008 at last and the energies across the internet (especially the blogosphere) are very different from last year. It’s a bit like looking at the Earth from the barren wastes of the Moon.

That’s enough poetry for at least 12 months. Time for business.

The question on everyone’s face is : where are we now? So, where are we now at Syntagma Media?

In response to the general climate, we’ve contracted our network from 55 sites at peak, to around 30. This has been done by merging similar topics, archiving low performers and deleting the occasional dud. It leaves us with a more manageable portfolio of properties and with the task of defining a new advertising strategy for it.

We’re also anticipating the launch of our first private information site dedicated to the retail sector and aimed at retail corporations. This will become the core business in 2008 and should provide some spinoff advertising for the network.

Our print publishing program has been put on hold pending the completion of my personal writing projects, which should be wrapped up by late spring.

Energies are generally low this week and it took great effort to complete this short post.

Thank you for reading it. We’ll be back on Planet Earth soon.