Syntagma’s designer, freelance Thord Hedengren — he designed this site and all our others — has been appointed editor of the Blog Herald by its owners, Splashpress Media.

He follows blog superstar Tony Hung, who also happens to be a medical doctor, so we can assume his time is at a premium.

The BH was started way back in 2003 by Duncan Riley, now at TechCrunch. In blog terms 2003 is the equivalent of 1903 for a print newspaper.

Thord also blogs on his own network in Sweden and on his site, tdhedengren.com. I’ve found him to have a detailed knowledge of the current internet scene, plus gossip and tech news around the blogosphere.

We wish Thord great success in his new gig. The Blog Herald, like all new media outlets, needs to stay fresh and vital with a stream of lively, world-class content.

With TDH at the helm it’s off to a flying restart.

Our designer, Thord Hedengren, writing in 901am, complains about the low value of the dollar. How would that affect him? Because like many people plying their trade on the internet he’s paid in dollars but lives outside the U.S.

He complains : “So I’m looking at my Paypal account and realize I won’t be moving any money anytime soon. The dollar’s down, has been for quite some time, and that means us non-US people make less for the same work.”

Currently, there are two dollars to every GB pound and, since a pound buys very roughly what a dollar buys in the States, it means we at Syntagma Media receive something like half the fee that an American company picks up, even when we are paid at the same rate.

Of course, it would work to our advantage if we were paid in sterling while our outgoings were designated in dollars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The internet is part of the dollar zone and will continue to be.

Thord goes on : “I lost equivalent of a grand (perhaps more when you read this, or less, depending on how the dollar moves compared to the Swedish crown) recently, just due to the dollar being down.”

Now I don’t know what the value of the Swedish Kroner is off-hand, but if it’s anything like the euro, he could be in an even worse situation than we British are.

The American economy is still chuntering along, despite a mammoth overseas trade deficit which is driving the dollar value down and making American goods and services cheaper for us abroad. This corrective mechanism clearly hasn’t gone far enough. Mostly this is due to Americans buying cheap Chinese goods — and who can blame them. The Chinese dollar surplus is then invested back into dollar assets on Wall Street. So the stock market moves up and cheap goods flood in. Everyone’s happy.

Except us worldwide writers and content providers who live in parts of Europe and get paid in dollars.