I’ve just joined Twitter — for technical reasons, I hasten to add.

A pair of lovebirds twittering

The technical reason is that I discovered that the username “Syntagma” had not been taken, so I secured it in perpetuity — or as long as any social network lasts, whichever is the shorter.

I’ve sprayed my entire Gmail address book with invites, so you may get one. Since it’s still over 300 addresses long, even after drastic pruning, I’m awaiting the results with some trepidation.

So far, I have one tweet on my sheet, a brilliant piece of literature about what I’ve been doing today. Please don’t all rush at once to view it or you may bring the server down.

If anyone wants to follow or be followed, just send a tweet to Syntagma. I’m sure the system will handle all the techie stuff. I still haven’t found my way around it all yet.

I will, naturally, produce a comprehensive analysis of the service soon. In under 140 characters, of course.

You know, maybe that’s where they’re going wrong.

I keep repeating that this site is non-political. And so it is.

You can hear a “but” coming, though, can’t you? Well, you’re wrong, it’s a “however”.

However, Syntagma has 90 American readers for every Brit, so, conscious as we are that politics is big news in the States right now, we have a small announcement to make:

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is coming to visit you this week.

Ignoring the deafening silence, I just want to bring you up to date on Broonie’s progress. Frankly it’s a regression of unparalleled proportions.

Leaving aside my own psychological assessment of him when he first came to office last year, yesterday we were treated to the most devastating political assassination by a journalist that I’ve ever read.

Even if you’re not interested in politics, read it as a master class in the art of personal destruction, much as you might tackle Machiavelli’s The Prince.

It’s all the more calamitous for Brown because the first half gives him his due, albeit in back-handed fashion. It’s what comes next that hits home. Matthew Parris, a journalist at The Times (London) and a broadcaster of great wit, provides us with a forensic deconstruction of Gordon Brown which overflows with such penetrating psychological insight that Brown must have shrivelled up when he read it.

Already far behind in the polls and with ratings only ever matched by Neville Chamberlain, Brown is practically dead in the water politically. Now read this extraordinary coup de grace.

Here it is.

The cartoon is by the brilliant Peter Brooke, also of The Times. It features Gordon Brown after a painting of a gruesome nude woman by Lucien Freud which sold for countless millions recently.

There’s quite a bit of chatter around about comments being separated from blog posts by various network services. Somehow this is said to diminish blogs as a folkish artform. Does that matter?

The 21st-century internet is the stuff of Quantum Mechanics. Everything is possible without limit, whatever we may think about the outcome. The Web is a vast array of small atoms, not large planets. Its laws are closer to magic than physics and can be said to exist only within the context of human thought.

Leaving that inevitability aside because we can’t influence it, I believe we should be more worried about small concerns in small cases.

A couple of months ago there was an explosion of comments on Twitter about the way an interview was conducted with a founder of Facebook by a hapless BusinessWeek reporter, who was deemed not to have done a great job. To read some A-list bloggers, you’d think Jesus had been crucified all over again.

The poor woman concerned must have felt the stigmata piercing her extremities.

As I commented on one blog, “If this is what passes for REALLY BIG NEWS on Twitter, God help us all.”

It’s the old, old story of mass hysteria breaking out on what seems to be the big question of the moment. If you don’t get involved, you’re somehow not quite alive. Even people not in the interview audience were screaming blue murder — apparently.

Now, I’m not going to have another go at Twitter. I actually admire Evan Williams and his business ethos. He deserves to succeed and he has many supporters.

I just wish the “wisdom of the crowd” was not being compressed into a few self-appointed Black Holes around various insignificant 1960s-style “happenings”.

We need the crowd to defeat tyrants, not to tyrannize ordinary folk just doing their jobs, no matter how awkwardly.

Here ends the sermon on no particular mount.

The twitter is beginning to sound a bit strangulated now. Like a flock of birds flying through a cloud of grapeshot.

Hugh Macleod’s cartoon sending up Twitter mania

It seems both Hugh Macleod (the gaping void — see cartoon above) and Robert Scoble are coming off Twitter, that maddeningly insistent waster of time for busy professionals who regularly protest about email-overload but tweet happily throughout the day to thousands of “followers”. Jeremy Wright too has whipped the twittering hierglyphics off his blog. At last sense has returned to the Techmeme crowd.

It’s becoming clear that the much derided New York Times article last Sunday, which pictured exhausted bloggers stumbling to early graves, has had an effect. Here at Syntagma we responded to the piece by suggesting a flight from Twitter as a first step to sanity.

Does anyone in real life speak in batches of 140 characters? I thought not. It’s so obviously an artificial way of communicating. And the way each twit begins with @fredbloggs as if a gun is being fired at his head, is very disconcerting.

The whole thing has got out of hand and GapingVoid’s cartoon gets it in a nutshell.