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.

Syntagma is taking a break over the Christmas holiday. We will be back on Wednesday January 2.

The mystery of the recent PageRank shake-up is beginning to settle down at last. Many sites, especially those running blog software, have taken a big hit.

For example, Techmeme has a PR of 4; the front page of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun, is also on 4, as is The Blog Herald — which is now more like Problogger.net than a news source for blogging.

However, many starry personal vehicles and big blogs are now on 3, down from 6s and 7s, although the quirky BoingBoing retains its 7. Syntagma is in good company then with its current 4.

What seems to be happening is that Google has caught up with the decline in blogs and blogging and is rebalancing its system to account for the over-ranking of many dull and uninteresting sites.

The perception has also been out there for some time that blogs in general have been using crafty methods of making money. Text links are seen by Google to be optimization aids for getting a false PR. In many cases, of course, they’re more like the classified ads in newspapers — just someone selling something.

After a lot of consideration, and a recent steady uptick in our network income, Syntagma has reached the conclusion that this may be a good thing — with some reservations, namely, the unpredictability of the process.

Separating out the pros from the dabblers is never a bad move, especially as the internet is becoming increasingly a major centre for commerce as its technology improves.

Google’s move has also forced a rethink on many online businesses about being dependent on the self-interest of another company as the source of its traffic. When a complex and essentially artificial algorithm begins to behave like an out-of-control robot, you want to find a more stable place of safety for your income stream.

Google has clearly calculated that it can dispense with most of the income from small blogs with little traffic, regarding it as the price of a cup of coffee from a long, long tail.

Syntagma Media would gladly take this nuisance off the bigco’s hands. A Starbucks cup of cents from each of 200 million blogs would certainly perk up our balance sheet.

It’s been a busy old week here at Syntagma Towers.

We’ve been refurbishing the office with new laptops, installing a giant HD screen with digital television, and throwing out a pile of junk.

We’ve also been optimizing our sites for the new PR Crunch era, and working on our latest projects for specialized information products.

It never ends. Blink and the world moves on without you.

But would we have it any other way? Never! Mind you, a good night’s sleep would be very nice.

Friday, and it’s the first cold day of the season. Heavy morning frost on the rooftops and a biting wind. Central heating full on, and winter woollies at the ready. It could be a cold one this year here in our northern latitudes.

Do we care? Not a jot or a tittle! Business is too good for that. Here’s what we’ll be thinking of :

Brigitte Bardot in her prime

The sun, I mean.

Mind how you go.

Syntagma Media apologizes for a rather long server outage which began on Sunday and has just ended.

I won’t go into the details but it was not a happy experience. We’re now back and raring to go — once we’ve mopped up all the midnight oil and spilt milk.

Good to be back. Mind how you go.

I’ve never really thought that Warren Buffett (pictured left) would want to invest in Syntagma Media, but an entrepreneur can dream.

Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and one of the top two or three richest people on the planet — heck, he even owns a hedge fund, is known for making shrewd investments. Where Warren burrows, others follow — like rabbits.

Like all good business folk he’s noticed that the dollar has been on the slide for quite a while, agonizingly compensating for America’s huge foreign trade deficit. Meanwhile, the poor old pound sterling is about to hit the starry heights of $2.10, making the greenback worth all of 47 pence (45 on PayPal).

For those of us paid in Uncle Sam’s Monopoly money that’s quite a hit we’re taking over here in the UK and Europe. We’ll be reduced to Dickensian conditions by year end, mark my words. We may even apply for Marshall Aid.

Anyway, back to Warren Buffett. He’s now announced he is NOT investing in any business whose income is designated in dollars.

Shrewd? Yes.

Scrooge? You said it. That’s why I say Buffett has rejected Syntagma Media.

On top of all that we have the credit crunch? Is that a new breakfast cereal? It’s the result of American banks giving mortgages to the trailer-park poor who couldn’t afford to repay them. They then sliced, diced and packaged them into “collateral debt obligations” and sold these to banks around the world.

Now banks don’t trust other banks — or their own balance sheets — so lending short-term funds to other financial institutions is at a standstill. Result? The world suddenly has an acute shortage of liquidity.

The U.S. used to be good at banking. What happened?

I’ve been writing about my interest in the economics of the retail sector for a year without very much happening. Now the long-gestated project is beginning to come to life thanks to our contacts with a number of specialist retail analysts.

One of the reasons I moved into the content business online was because of a long-term plan to create specialist information products for high-worth niches, published privately or behind subscription walls.

The idea goes back to my initial training in information science at the Central Office of Information in London. The COI is part of the Foreign Office, for which I also produced specialist information packages for Britain’s Embassies abroad. These were mainly product and technology based.

Now, working with a small team of retail analysts, we’ve hatched the first of these new projects aimed at large retail corporations. The project will have its own corporality separate from Syntagma Media, which will own a share of the business.

Given Google’s sudden froideur towards digital networks, this will provide much-needed diversification away from our reliance on Google traffic and rankings.

The retail product will be followed by others of a similar nature. They won’t be visible to a general audience, although some of the knowledge-base may trickle down into Syntagma sites.

The quality of the product is everything, of course. High-worth clients are not going to pay real money for information generally available in the press. Expertise and relevance are essential. I believe our team has that, and coupled with Syntagma’s in-house information skills, the result will be a killer product for the industry.

Year 3 of the Syntagma odyssey begins with a bang.

You always knew it would.

We have fielded a lot of emails in the past three days about the still developing situation between internet giant Google and text-link buying agents, like TextLinkAds.com.

To recap, Google has conducted a manual search of mainly networked sites to penalize commercial publishers who sell links via the agencies, or who have hand-rolled ads without rel=”nofollow” in the code. The code stops Google’s robot from following the link to its source, thus avoiding clocking up a backlink for the buying site.

The more ranked backlinks a site has, the higher its PageRank. Google has been progressively lowering the rankings of sites on which perceived mal-dispositions are found.

For example, Syntagma — which we expected to rank 6 by now — has dropped to 3 in the latest round of carnage. Our site Fifty-Something Women — which has around 20 text links of various sorts — has fallen from 5 to 2. This gives the artificial impression that the site has low traffic and puts off some ad buyers who respect Google’s approval.

Google claims the ads are skewing the results of its search engine, replacing relevancy and authority with the ability to purchase links, i.e. buy authority and relevancy rather than earn them through merit.

There is some force in that argument, although the contrarian view is that Google itself is now skewing its own results by retreating from its pure search criteria.

Also, many observers believe Google is attempting to crush the businesses of the astonishingly successful agencies that sell the links. Its own text-based system Adsense, has undoubtedly taken a knock from TLAs in recent months, especially on low-to-medium trafficked sites, which do poorly on the Google system.

Whatever the facts in this case, Google has created the monster from which it is now suffering.

Background
A mere 15 years ago, at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, founder Larry Page saw literary citations as a software opportunity for the web. Nowadays, it’s hard to see beyond the system he produced, first BackRub, a way of measuring backlinks to articles and sites, and then PageRank, the most addictive element in web oneupmanship. Has that system really served us well?

To generate Googlejuice you have to cite and cite regularly and relevantly. The blogosphere, in particular, is a madhouse of clickability. The genius of Google is that it didn’t just transfer the bane of academic publishing, the citation system, onto the web, but that it discovered how it could profit enormously from the process.
/Background

Is it now pulling the rug from under other companies who are using its innovative scheme to build businesses on the web?

The link, or citation, system is behind the present controversy in the search business. The wonder is that Google tolerated the SEO — or Google gaming — system for so long. The sudden rush to penalize publishers has a rather thuggish feel about it, particularly as the broken bit in this chain lies within the software of the companies that broker the ads.

Jason Calacanis, formerly chief of Weblogs, Inc, which sold to AOL for a reported $30m, has put up a good piece in which he explains how he created the interlinking system between blogs and also hosted the first text link ads.

Where are we now?
We are now at the point where we have to decide. Do we take the ads down, or leave them up and suffer the consequences, the extent of which is not yet clear?

At Syntagma, we have sites which are 90 percent plus dependent on text links. We are therefore going to sit this out and observe what happens. We will keep faith with our advertisers. Business as usual.

However, we strongly urge the brokerage companies of text links to do deals with Google on this matter. Not only is their business model in grave danger of being blown out of the water, but it may be that small tweaks in their software will be enough to allow Google room to compromise.

After all, there are a lot of enraged publishers out there, who feel they have been badly let down by the giant of the internet. Uncle Google has suddenly turned into the wicked stepfather.

Returning to the subject covered in a recent post here on Google’s change of format for Adsense blocks which occur more than three times on a page, we have now reduced the default Wordpress posts-per-page package from 10 to three.

So, if you want to read more than the top three posts — and why not? –just click on the link “Previous entries”. You will then be presented with nearly 700 posts dished up three at a time.

This gets round the awkward cut off after three posts, when Google puts up “This web page cannot be found”, or at least triggers it locally.

I hope this will gain more aesthetically than it loses in convenience. Please let me know if you have any problems.