We’ve been beavering away at this for quite a while. Our new company, Local Ventures Online, will launch Devon & Cornwall Online around June 15.

Designed by Swedish web maestro Thord Hedengren, the site is a hybrid between a local newspaper and a classy weblog.

It’s also an advertising vehicle across a number of local and national fields, concentrating on familar categories, like Holidays, Property, Finance, Professionals … and many more.

There are some great deals for advertisers in the first three months, while we tweak and add complexity, so get in quick before all the prime positions are taken. We’ve already got banners for Sainsbury’s, Scottish Widows, World Vision and, yes, Syntagma Media, among others.

Don’t lose out on our bonanza introductory offers. In the first instance, contact: john@syntagmamedia.com for an electronic ratecard.

A view frequently expressed by internet entrepreneurs and commentators is: “Local is good”. To put it bluntly, it means that there’s more money to be made by serving a local community with advertising than by offering global coverage.

Three years ago that was not true. Even when the dollar was low and the pound high, a British website could make more from U.S. ads than British ones. I know, I tried both.

Here I’m more concerned with very local conditions: individual towns and counties. And, in particular, that “river of gold”, classified advertising.

Small Ads, as most people call them, are deserting local newspapers in a mad stampede and migrating online. Big ticket categories like cars, properties and jobs are piling into specialized websites where you can upload pictures and text, then sit back and wait for the response.

Local papers are losing out across the board in these areas. Many are closing down, most are currently up for sale. A month ago the Daily Mail group sold the prestigious London Evening Standard for £1 to a Russian oligarch who was once a KGB spy. The original Northcliffe must be spinning in his tomb.

The economics are stark: the costs of printing and distributing a newspaper or magazine, to the standards we have grown used to, are now prohibitive. Big websites may not yet be yielding a profit, but their smaller, nippier competitors are, or are about to do just that.

The question of where we will get our local news from is a pertinent one, especially as many councils are using badly-drafted anti-terror legislation to spy on people’s habits and activities. Not only do we get a KGB spymaster owning a major local newspaper, but KGB methodology too.

Clearly we need to be informed in our local patch. While 24-hour news concentrates on mainstream concerns at a national and international level, big TV is generally retreating from small stories in small towns. It’s not at all obvious whether small stations can fill the gap, while radio is blind and full of pop music.

It’s also true that big broadcasting and big print occasionally miss the point big time. The Daniel Hannan moment where a politician’s denunciation of Gordon Brown bypassed the mainstream media completely, but became a worldwide hit on YouTube, is a typical case. The story subsequently reflected back into MSM as an internet phenomenon rather than a political one.

Local information needs a light and deft touch, often absent from the big battalions.

As local newspapers fade away, they will be replaced by cheaply run local websites — a cut above blogs but using the same kind of technology and methods.

Here at Syntagma we are setting up a separate company to move into this space. We will start with a Devon and Cornwall site in May, followed by Somerset, and other counties down the line.

It’s an exciting time to be online in the content business. Costs are low, opportunities wide. But above all, with a whole tier of local news disappearing, including ITV’s variable contributions, it’s all to play for.

Local is not only good, it may well be best.

John Evans

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A new feature summarizing policy ideas suggested on this site.

From: DIARY: Education, March 1, 2009.

The State education system in Britain just gets worse and worse. Hyperactive jobsworths are forever coming up with new wheezes that dazzle in the headlines for an hour but have no merit in practice.

The entire structure is probably beyond repair after 12 years of scorched earth policies for everything that promotes a well-stocked mind and an understanding of the principles that stand behind ideas and formulations.

The Conservatives have yet to jettison some of Labour’s most pernicious obsessions, like the refusal to allow selection in academic subjects. I have high hopes they will do so in office.

But what should the basic education system provide?

It should give students the ability to position themselves in time and space, with historical narrative as the time axis, and geography as the space axis. Both subjects have been severely downgraded in primary and secondary schooling.

The curriculum should also be shorn of soft “social” subjects better learnt at home or through experience. All attempts at social engineering should be strictly outlawed.

Psychobabble has become a wordy substitute for a true understanding of human nature, which is not a machine. Allied to that, PC (political so-called correctness) has assumed fascist proportions in attempts to control the thoughts of the population. Schools lead the way as mind-cleansing centres of anything with which the government disagrees.

Why do they do that? Because “they” — and we know who they are — want us all to be just like them.

Sorry, we don’t.

A lost generation of schoolchildren from the Labour years will probably never be redeemed and will haunt the future as they carry the mouldy seed of mediocrity forward.

The Conservatives can make a start on creating a new wave of educated young people with a better grasp of the fundamentals and of more use to the 21st-century world.

From: Conservatives dream of Silicon Alley, February 27, 2009.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to adopt the can-do attitudes of West Coast Silicon Valley and Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train home-grown developers and software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East. More engineers in general are also urgently needed.

From: Why is Gordon Brown protecting the rest of the world?, January 31, 2009.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

The Conservative Shadow Education spokesman, Michael Gove, will have his work cut out to make instant improvements to a depressingly hopeless State education system. It will take three Parliaments to get the structure right, never mind the quality teachers it needs.

Opposition from the blockheaded educational establishment will be fierce. An alternative approach might be to set up a separate system alongside the State one, allowing parents to migrate across voluntarily. It would be difficult for teachers’ unions to strike against the freely made choices of parents and pupils.

Abolishing the politically contaminated teachers’ training colleges would also be a godsend to good heads and concerned parents.

As a self-appointed member of that exotic species named “internet entrepreneurs”, I was interested in Fraser Nelson’s article in the current issue of The Spectator.

The summary of the piece states: “… the Conservatives are taking their cue from the West Coast of America: the land of Google, Stanford University and venture capital. They want to rebuild Britain in California’s image: dynamic, high-tech, green and ‘family-friendly’.”

That is a good idea … up to a point.

California has its exhilarating high points for sure. It also embraces deep pits of madness. As a melting-pot State with many right-on East Coast emigres, plus millions of Hispanics up from the South, mostly illegal, it lacks the sense of cohesion Britain once had, and still does in some parts of the country. It’s home as well to ancient Baby Boomer clans and sects that hanker after the long-gone era of “flower power”. It’s also on the brink of bankruptcy.

California has an annual income roughly the same as the UK’s. Recently it was said to be overtaking Britain and would soon be the fourth largest world economy. We won’t know if that’s really true until the dust settles from the current depression.

On this side of the duck pond, we tend to see only two aspects of the State: Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Both conjure up images of starlets on roller skates, prettily propelling themselves along wide pavements against a background of endless sun, sea and sand to the sound of the ululating Beach Boys.

We blank out the forest fires, the frequent earthquakes, the smogs, boot to bumper car jams, crime, and the cute chaos of the place. It’s a young person’s environment, maddeningly obtuse about lots of things, always eager to jump on any passing whimsy that offers a new thrill.

Incubator of the future, yes, but also progenitor of a million tried and rejected poppycock schemes. The Brits who wash up there are usually attention seekers, like actors, singers and graduates of Performing Arts schools.

California is also hard work. Michael Arrington, who built up TechCrunch from nothing, has had a series of health problems from overwork, including exhaustion, nervous and heart complaints. He recently received serious death threats and was spat on in a public place, requiring a month off work.

TechCrunch.com is a blog-based content network that evaluates startup enterprises and their products. It’s no place for the fainthearted apparently.

Duncan Riley, who originated The Blog Herald from a quiet corner of Western Australia, graduated to TechCrunch and spent some time in the Valley. His observations on the crazy greed of the place, its supercharged way of life and general attrition against human health and sanity, contributed to my own decision not to move there at the height of the boom.

And yet the lessons of the Valley and of the Californian and Seattle-based tech scenes can be learnt and imported by a new Tory administration.

Britain needs to manufacture more, especially high tech equipment and derivatives. Silicon Valley specializes largely in internet-based software and services, but it doesn’t make the hardware. The metal and plastic bits are cheaper to produce and assemble in the Far East, and that will remain so in the future.

The operating software, which the Valley does so well, is deferred design and therefore part of the manufacturing process. No-one will buy a generalist box of tricks with no room for applications.

There is also a third level in the making of computer technology, that of application writing — the creative bit. The operating software contains a series of APIs (application programming interfaces) which allow outside creators (programmers) to add products and services to the basic design.

Increasingly, these services are being dangled from “the cloud”, a magical place in cyberspace where software applications and APIs reside for public use. Software on hard drives is going rapidly out of fashion at the punchy end of the market.

The British happen to be very good at these secondary and tertiary levels of the manufacturing process. One thing holds them back.

The national curriculum and the educational establishment relentlessly discriminate against “abstract thinking”, the basic skill for succeeding in these areas. Universities are encouraged to subvert their course lists in favour of cottonwool subjects like media studies and sports management.

In Britain, you can select students for State schooling only in areas of music, sport, and other physical and dexterity arts. You can’t select for mathematics or disciplines which require abstract thinking, like philosophy, theoretical physics or logic.

Stupidly and destructively, the Labour party has created all manner of taboos against it, raising any proposer of academic selection almost to criminal status. So far, the Conservatives have gone along with this for a quiet life. They fear the demonizing power of the left, which is far nastier than they are.

That amounts to national suicide, especially for a country that was, within living memory, responsible for 55 percent of the world’s primary inventions and discoveries.

If George Osborne wants to mimic West Coast Silicon Valley or Seattle, let him sort out that problem first. Britain needs to train its own software engineers, not import them from India and the Far East.

Globalization will take a long time to recover from its recent catastrophic fall from grace. We need to look carefully at ourselves and incubate the future here at home. Empire building abroad can wait … for now.

John Evans

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This has been a year of portents. We’ve had so many “end of the world is nighs” that we’re probably into “the end of the end of the world is nigh” by now.

It clearly isn’t the end of the world though, just the end of our picture of it as a booming sybaritic paradise.

A new Great Depression was well trailed this year and last, despite scornful voices to the contrary. Those of us who knew it was coming are now fearful it may be even worse than we thought. Portents do sometimes come true.

The prophesies surrounding the Large Hadron Collider were probably the most entertaining, especially when it spluttered to a halt before it ever got going. It’s still in the repair shop, naturally, and the universe has not been sucked into a Black Hole caused by a few lengths of pipe and wiring in Switzerland. How arrogant to imagine it would.

However, a scientist now believes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is revolving around a Black Hole 4000 times larger than the sun. He can’t prove it of course, it’s just a possibility thrown up by his mathematical modelling.

Frankly I’d rather believe an astrologer. At least the planets are visible to the naked eye and the results of the predictions are clear for all to see. So it interests me, as a student of the ancient and arcane, that today an almighty Grand Cross is forming in the sky around us.

Jonathan Cainer describes it thus on his astrological website:

“The rare ‘grand cross’ culminates today with the full Moon in Gemini. As you watch it rise in the sky, look towards the setting Sun. You’ll see Venus and Jupiter, beaming in the twilight. Also near the Sun is Mars — too low to view but in a position of great significance. Half way between the rising Moon and setting Sun is Uranus, invisible without a telescope. Opposite Uranus, halving the sector of sky beneath our feet, is the planet Saturn. You can’t see it but you can easily see the impact of this ‘grand cross’. Just look at how strangely people are behaving!”

I like that last bit. To my eye, people are always behaving strangely, especially politicians and scientists. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for bringing to our attention this majestic astral configuration.

It’s the grand culmination of … something. The apogee of … infinite possibility, perhaps. If you are about to rush to the supermarket to stock up with cases of baked beans and bottled water, stop! It’s way too late. The tentacles of strangeness are already encircling you. You never know, you may enjoy the experience.

So if my Saturday Ramble column on this site tomorrow appears a little…er…strange, how could you tell the difference?

John Evans

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What a day to have a birthday. With the world and its future darkening visibly around us, and crunch turning to munch, we’re all seemingly heading for lunch on a plate, not seated at the table.

However, amidst all that financial chaos there is some good news: Syntagma is three years old.

Three is a significant number in horse, dog and internet years. Horses get to run in the Derby, dogs are the equivalent of 21, and anything on the internet is a virtual centenarian.

When we started out 36 long months ago, this site was a pure technology and media play. It was also the cheerleader for the launch of new sites on a large sprinkling of topics. Now I write here only about politics, finance and technology, in that order of magnitude. You won’t need to ask why, discerning Reader.

Many of the old staff have moved on — those who remain have aged visibly, some even look like centenarians.

Enough of the past, it is another country as someone once said — The Shire, perhaps. If the future looks more like the Land of Mordor, I fancy we’ll glean something of value and interest from it, and certainly something to write about — whatever horrors it throws at us.

So what’s the prognosis for Syntagma’s fourth year of operations, bearing in mind it is a business as well as an online publication?

In the wider world, freight shipping is slowing at the same rate it did at the end of 1931. There are so many similarities popping up between now and the 1930s, it’s beginning to take on a distinct Tolkien shade of dark mist and distant pointy mountains.

Even Russia, with it’s massive half-trillion of cash reserves, is sliding into a downward spiral towards another bankruptcy and authoritarianism.

We ourselves on this sceptred Isle will not be spared a decade of pitiful growth, or none, as we purge the vast vaults of debt accumulated under the deceptively-stern gaze of Prudence in recent years.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it in today’s Telegraph, “The world stole prosperity from the future for year after year, with the full collusion of governments, regulators, and central banks. Now the future has arrived.”

Well, we are still here. And we will prevail until we come out the other side like foot soldiers returning from the trenches. In internet age, I calculate we’ll be around 300.

Something to celebrate, surely?

P.S. As a contrast with today, here’s Syntagma’s first birthday piece. Read here.

John Evans

This Saturday I’m impelled by an urge to write about something less gloomy than the world financial meltdown. So I’ve chosen:

The death of the database.

Bear with me, it’s not as dark as it sounds, and is much more interesting than it seems. In fact, if you’ve ever struggled with a database, like Microsoft’s Access, you may be forgiven for throwing your hat in the air.

First principles first. When we begin playing around with computers, we become aware there are two types of memory — the stuff that disappears when the computer is turned off, or during a power cut, this is Random Access Memory (RAM); and secondly, the hard drive onto which we save our work to preserve it when the computer is shut down.

We learn to be wary of RAM because most of us will have lost chunks of work when something goes wrong. We place much more faith in the hard drive, even though they can go pop too.

Hard drives are run by databases — a form of software that organizes data so that it can be retrieved from a number of different angles. Databases are the worker bees of almost every software application. They purr away in the background while we type — paging, fetching and carrying all manner of information at our bidding.

Syntagma is powered by Wordpress software which operates dynamically, making constant calls to a serverside database to construct pages on the fly. It can be a slow process sometimes and is prone to error for the slightest of reasons.

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

I must admit I was slightly dumbstruck when I heard that piece of information.

And that’s the shape of the future. Cloud computing, as it’s called, rather poetically, makes a local hard drive redundant. In future, if Google gets its way, we will work almost exclusively through our browsers, with applications in the “cloud”, that’s to say online in a form of super-RAM memory. Hence, the death of the database as we’ve known it.

The British Government is addicted to creating endless databases containing every fact about us. Most of them don’t work, and they leak information faster than the Colorado River leaks water. Ministers might like to consider cloud computing as a cheaper alternative.

Of course, it may seem a bit risky to entrust all your information to a single company holding it in the most fleeting form of remembrance possible, but that’s what the future looks like.

Imagine not having to keep offsite backup copies of everything on a second drive or memory stick. Think how cheap computers will become if they don’t need hard drives or massive operating systems, like Windows. Conjure up a world where everything can be done on a small box — any small box, anywhere in the world — and with the minimum of equipment and maintence. In fact, think smartphone, enlarged for more comfort and ease of use.

Clive Sinclair used to claim that you could run a nuclear power station on his little ZX80 computer back in the early 1980s. I always refused to believe that, but he may have been right. In the next decade we’ll be able to run the world from a BlackBerry.

Clouds and blackberries. William Wordsworth would feel very much at home in the 21st century.

John Evans

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I’ve been playing with Google’s shiny new browser, named Chrome, for a week or more. Initial impressions are excellent, despite the obvious fact that we’ve only got a small part of its capability at this stage.

Chrome has the same elegant, simple design that Google is famous for, and it’s much faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox. Indeed, it renders Syntagma sites better than Firefox does — one of the reasons I stopped using it a year ago. By contrast, Chrome delivers a seamlessly fluid performance over a range of functions.

Syntagma in Google’s Chrome browser

Like most Google products its browser comes with a broader philosophy, or masterplan, than the functionality suggests. While any browser will render internet objects for viewing and manipulation, Chrome is much more ambitious.

Ultimately it’s intended to replace many features of the operating systems on computers with what has become known as “cloud” computing — using applications and services already web-side, not embedded on a local hard drive.

Google says, “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Significantly, Microsoft has huge vested interests in boxed software and desktop products in general, from which the bulk of its income derives. It’s finding it all but impossible to substitute browser versions of them and still make money. A clash with the new Google worldview — which aims to strip the Microsofties of their dominance — is about to break out in earnest.

Google believes Microsoft may fire its first broadband broadside by switching off adverts in IE8 sometime soon. Internet Explorer Version 8 is still in Alpha mode and is, reportedly, hopelessly mired in problems — shades of Windows Vista — but when it comes it could contain a bombshell for Google.

Since Google is still a monoculture based on search and its accompanying advertising, that would hit them where it hurts most. The share value of the company would drop overnight and the sense of invincibility that Google has enjoyed on Wall Street and everywhere else would be shattered, maybe for good.

Hence the company has got its retaliation in first by bringing out its own browser — which has been hinted at for years. It has also encouraged Mozilla, an open-source firm that produces Firefox (the geeks browser of choice), while promising a new cloud environment based on Chrome and its web-based apps: Google docs, spreadsheets and presentations, directly challenging Microsoft Office. And there are many other new experiences under development in Google’s locker.

A lot of us in web publishing still haven’t forgiven the Californian crew for their treatment of small-to-medium internet publishers last year, many of whom were driven out of business by crashes in PageRank. But Google’s sense of adventure and all-embracing strategic coherence means you can’t hate them for long.

Chrome should be on everyone’s computer, simply because much of what the Googlers are doing will only be viewable in their rapidly developing cloud browser.

Sooner than we think, businesses will be eliminating their expensive data centres and embracing cloud computing. Internet sage Bob Cringely of PBS believes that “relatively few organizations really ought to have their own data centers”.

Chrome is the future. It’s not fully with us yet, but will be in the next decade, which, astonishingly, is only a little more that a year away.

It probably hasn’t escaped many people’s attention that on Wednesday an important event is taking place in the rarified world of Big Science.

At Geneva, CERN is to fire up its new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a massive particle accelerator which is the child of the aborted American version in Texas.

This multi-billion dollar project may give an assorted band of scientists insight into what happened one-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, or so they claim.

That, of course, begs a number of questions. Was there a Big Bang at all, or do we have a Steady State universe, as the British astronomer Fred Hoyle asserted, in which matter is continually created?

Again, if space and time are illusions of the mind, as many scientists and philosophers believe, isn’t it likely that matter also is a figment of the mind’s buoyant imagination?

Strange that quantum physicists have no idea what gives matter mass. To fill the void in their knowledge they have plucked a new particle from thin air, so to speak. It’s called the Higgs Boson after its proposer, Peter Higgs.

Some commentators have jumped on this exquisite piece of fiction and named the new arrival, the God Particle. The Collider’s main mission is to discover traces of this elusive little bit of stuff.

And that’s where we’re at. Billions of European taxpayers’ money has been spent on trying to find Winnie the Pooh.

Naturally, they will come up with something. But will it be yet another fiction, arising from yet another mathematical model, and simply explaining the inexplicable by filling in the gaps with a bit of cartoon wizardry? We just don’t know, but can guess with a fair degree of confidence in the outcome. However, CGI is no substitute for the truth.

The end of the world is nigh
Most of the press and other media are concentrating on a more exciting aspect of this story.

That the forces unleashed inside the great particle accelerator will create a small Black Hole which will suck the Earth into it, and progressively, the rest of the universe bit by bit. As disaster scenarios go that must take the gold medal by a mile.

Others believe there’s a chance the reaction could change the fabric of space and time itself. It could speed it up, slow it down or even cause it to stand still. Result? We could all start saying or doing the same thing, over and over. Groundhog Day on acid.

Naturally, the Prophesies of Nostradamus are never far away from some people’s thoughts, especially the one that mentions Geneva.

So what is the most likely result when the big beast is finally switched on early Wednesday morning GMT?

Zilch.

How do I know that? Well, consider: the Earth is one vast particle accelerator, dwarfing even the great chunk of engineering buried beneath the French landscape. Countless cosmic rays are hitting the planet’s atmosphere every moment, colliding with all kinds of matter. So far, no Black Holes have been spotted lurking in the Van Allen Belt.

Indeed, the more honest of the scientists involved gave the game away when he admitted that the H.G.Wellsian machine may be much too small. “We may have to go back and ask for more money to build a bigger one,” he let slip. One wonders how safe his pension is.

The problem with all this peering into the soup of life is that it’s alive, just like us. The great Albert Einstein asserted that human observers affect the processes we observe. In other words we are co-creators of the universe. What we expect to see, we often get. The boffins want a Higgs particle that gives mass to matter. They will surely conjure up something like it.

But what, I’m inclined to ask, gives the property of mass-accumulation to the Higgs confection? Yet another particle? Where does it end?

The argument goes on and on, an infinite regression in human minds that can’t see the simple truth: that the universe is made of infinitely-adaptable mind-stuff, not hard lumps of rock floating about in a void with consciousness as “a disease of matter”.

One good thing may come out of this — with any luck. The new religion of Scientism may go into retreat when the last vestiges of the seven veils it holds up to the world are finally divested from the naked body of the universe and we find a mind looking back at us.

But I doubt the LHC is big enough even to make a start on that.

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