The weather is so good I’m extending my spring break for another two days.

See you on Wednesday.

This is to announce our new consultancy business, Dial Consultants, which covers digital publishing, online content creation and management.

The business is separate from Syntagma Digital and is part of Dial Publishing, our print publishing house.

On offer : 20 years experience in magazine, general, and educational publishing — see here, here and here – and, in particular, one and a half years building Syntagma Digital from scratch into a 50 website content creator, divided into four network magazines. Add on a career as a full-time author and journalist and that’s the swagbag now dangling at the door of Syntagma Towers.

To contact Dial Consultants, email : John(at)dialpublishing(dot)com. It’s as simple as that.

We are now actively working on the next planned development of our network magazine concept. This involves opening them up to suitable sites/blogs outside the Syntagma Digital inventory.

The move will allow external sites inclusion in our rolling feeds, plus graphical representation on the portals and participation in the Editor’s Pick of the Posts. In addition, they will become recipients of any magazine-wide advertising deals we negotiate going forward. Involvement will not change the ownership, hosting arrangements, or running of outside sites in any way.

We are currently looking at the technical and monetary aspects of this proposal and will reach some decisions over the coming month. Inclusion will be open to all four of our network magazines :

Allusionz – Arts and Philosophies
LifeTimes – Lifestyles and Celebrities
21st-century Phi – Sciences and Future Technologies
(Coming Soon) Moneyizor — Money Matters and Small Business.

In the meantime, site/blog owners who may be interested in this proposition can email me to register an interest and be involved in the early stages of the arrangement. The email address is in the footer.

Update : In an interview with 901am, the conversation continued :

How will you split the revenue with participating sites?
We’re currently looking at a 70/30 split in favor of the client for all new magazine-wide advertising. That beats what’s on offer elsewhere, at least to my knowledge. It also has added advantages in terms of traffic.

What’s your goal with adding more sites to the various network magazines? Are there any milestones you want to reach, and where will it lead eventually?
The goal is to use the increased page views from the extra sites to secure better advertising for everyone aggregated in the magazine, including our own authors. It makes sense to maximize the use of the content platforms we’re creating in a way that benefits everyone involved. As for milestones, the system is totally expansible with no limits that I can see.

External sites and blogs will get exposure on our content platforms, traffic back, and 70% of new advertising revenue generated on contributing sites. Owners pay nothing, and virtually do nothing for all that. It’s got to be one of the best deals around.

Since downloading IE7 (Internet Explorer) I’ve become a huge fan of its Cleartype feature. This is a technology Microsoft has been working on for years that eliminates the ragged edges of text displayed in the browser. I have an idea the technical term is anti-aliasing.

I’m totally addicted to Cleartype now because it converts scratchy browser text to the quality expected from expensive desktop software, like Microsoft Office 2007.

The main problem though comes when I switch to Firefox. It’s like falling back through time and emerging in the 1990s.

After asking and Googling around, I’ve discovered that you can turn Cleartype on globally in Windows XP — and presumably Vista too.

The route to text heaven is : Start -> Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance -> Effects… -> “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts”. Select Clear Type from the dropdown menu, apply and OK your way out.

Believe me, it’s worth it, and, what’s more, you’ll view our extensive inventory under the best possible conditions.

Syntagma — now incorporated as Syntagma Digital Ltd. — is delighted to announce its 4th network magazine : Moneyizor, which will range over money, financials and small business.

The launch of the portal is something of a moveable feast at present since we are currently transforming both the network and the business to a target of Easter. But it will definitely hit the virtual newsstands around April.

Stay close.

The final step in our reorganization has been taken. Syntagma Media is now a redundant name, except in the URL of this webtitle, where it will remain. It may, though, be resurrected as a holding company when Syntagma Television appears on your screens in 2008.

Dial Publishing — the print arm — has been completely separated off from the online business, which will now be incorporated in the UK as Syntagma Digital.

We’ve introduced these changes gradually to see how they feel in practice and whether we can live with them. The answer is, yes. Apart from the internet address of this site, all references to Syntagma Media will be eventually removed from the inventory.

The reason is not that we cease to be a media business, just that there are a lot of them out there. Anyone blogging about blogging these days refers to themselves as a media business. We are following our own path and the new titles reflect that.

Okay, it’s not such a big deal, but names are important as they become brands over time. Syntagma is the brand, digital is what we do, “media” is a given and doesn’t need stressing in the company name.

As for Dial Publishing, it will take on a life of its own as a print publisher of business and digital-publishing books. It will also cover our consultancy business and all other offline activities. Dial will no longer be referred to as the print arm of Syntagma Media.

So the process of reconstructing the business that began three months ago is almost complete. In a week or two we can get down to some real work at last — producing large amounts of quality digital content.

Note : Some domain names are currently pointing to this site. They include : SyntagmaDigital.com, SyntagmaTelevision.com and SyntagmaTV.com. These properties will be built in due course.

You may have spotted the new header on Syntagma today. It’s a move away from the Romanesque capitals we’ve had for a while into an upper/lower case format with a different typeface (font) altogether.

The sub-header “The Vantage Point” also drops the company descriptions that more properly belong to Syntagma Media than the Syntagma webtitle. It’s been bugging me for a while, now it’s done.

You may guess that this is part of the ongoing reorganization and redefinition of the business prior to incorporation. You will be right.

The newest crib on the block for Syntagma Digital is the second of Guy Adams’s three new webtitles : The Dark Room - Literary Worlds of Horror, part of our Allusionz network magazine.

Guy Adams is a full-time professional author and writer, as well as being a partner and senior editor in the British publishing company, Humdrumming.

Horror…for many years a fictional genre that has suffered from a less than sterling reputation.

If ever an argument against over-exposure exists in fiction writing then Horror is the perfect example. For hundreds of years writing about the darker things in life (both real and supernatural) was considered a rich and healthy pastime. Shakespeare was no stranger to the Grand Guignol of storytelling, Dickens was a sap for the ghostly tale…a glance at a school syllabus will see old staples as Stoker and Shelley deemed perfectly valid ‘classics’.

Also watch out for Guy’s The Hack’s Progress, which will be up and scribbling next week.

Read The Dark Room.

In previous posts I’ve looked at creating a digital network out of own-resources – bootstrapping — as a way of avoiding the venture capital squeeze — bear-hugging. Now it’s time for some specifics.

Lately, we’ve been looking back over the past 16 months of Syntagma Media’s existence and attempting to work out the full cost of the operation in monetary terms. Remember, it’s been done without VC finance, bank or Angel loans or equity sales of any kind. The only aid has been a credit card, which is cleared at the end of every month. Clearly someone must have borne the full cost.

We calculated all the costs of setup, fees for advice, authoring, design, general tech, plus all the usual business stuff. I also added in my own cost and resources at my standard consultancy rate. The sweep mainly included Syntagma Digital, but also the much smaller liabilities of Dial Publishing — our incubating print arm.

The total cost to my personal exchequer came to $250,000.

I must confess I was a little taken aback by that number. I hadn’t realized I had that amount of loose change floating about. But accountancy doesn’t lie.

Of course, there has been a good deal of income, especially in the past 6 — 9 months. All of that has also gone back into the business. So the bottom line sits on the question : is Syntagma Digital worth more than a quarter of a million bucks?

I’ll let you into a secret, I was offered more than that around four months ago, but the deal involved running someone else’s British business.

Setting up a digital content business then doesn’t come cheap. The fact is, we could have spent considerably more as, for example, our near contemporary b5media has. It’s very much a matter of priorities and some fine calculation of whether a particular expenditure will be cost-effective or not. In my experience (16 months worth) most expenditures are not.

Refining the art of spending is therefore top of the agenda when it comes to bloodsucking your business — I use that term instead of bootstrapping here because it helps to know that it’s your blood the business is sucking. That knowledge alone concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Finale : Sixteen months in, $250,000 down, working like a sugar-cane cutter, no end in sight. Is it all worth it? Wait for the book*. All the killer facts are there.

* The Syntagma Story by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing later this year.