After much research and crystal ball gazing, here are Syntagma’s tech predictions for 2007. They’re made on the premise that predictions are rarely right whatever we say :

1. Microsoft announces the next version of its Windows operating system will be named “Alpha Centauri” after a star situated 6 million light-years away. Following sporadic media hilarity, the company hastily changes it to, “Coming Soon”.

2. Former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is appointed CEO of startup company, YoHoo. Speaking from Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch, where he’s enjoying a freebie holiday with his wife and extended family, Blair says, “President Bush suggested it, so I could hardly refuse”.

3. The Blog Herald is sold again to website : www.@/#~35hgd+*g.blogspot.com, which turns out to be a splog owned by would-be Russian oligarch Oleg Splatovski, who once bid a non-existent oil well for Chelsea Football Club. The price paid for The Blog Herald is said to be one million barrels of Vladivostok crude.

4. Techmeme is bought by Disney Corp as part of its expansion into Web 2.0 cartoon inventory. Later, a red-faced spokesduck says, “We thought it was a Mickey Mouse website”.

5. Robert Scoble announces he’s running for President in 2008. John Edwards agrees to become his running mate saying, “I know a good thing when I see it.”

6. Martin Neumann publishes his first digital book under new imprint, kickstartpress : “How We Won the Ashes”. Withdrawing the title later, Neumann says he didn’t realize the book was more than a year old.

7. Google admits it made a mistake in purchasing YouTube and sells it on to b5media for $1.7 billion. A press release from b5 claims, “It’s a real bargain, especially as Rick Segal is paying for it out of his contingency fund”.

8. TechCrunch is bought by Kelloggs Corp for an undisclosed sum. An insider source says, “It’s a great name for our new, improved cornflakes recipe”.

9. Syntagma Media launches a new social network where users can post their worst ever mistakes. Called YouBoob, it’s quickly bought up by David Krug for $2.6 billion. Krug later laments, “We thought it was a porn site”.

You heard it here first. Mind how you go.

It’s not really a red rag to a bull, more a spinnaker in a field of Spanish fighting bovines. Joseph Rago (note the name) has a total pop at the blogocracy in today’s Wall Street Journal, and boy does he land some heft.

“Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

First into the ring to challenge raging Rago is former heavyweight champ, Duncan Riley, a blog evangelist of some years standing, but now reduced to a small outpost somewhere in Western Australia. I won’t quote Duncan because a lot of it is unprintable in a family publication like Syntagma.

What Rago is doing is to lament the “passing” — or imminent demise — of the words-on-paper publication. He believes the editorial expertise and fact-checking that underpins print media is being shredded by the instantaneous hullaballoo of the blog form.

He’s right on that, of course, but in the process he’s tarring everyone with a large, but broadly insignificant, brush. If anyone wants a considered, fact checked, intelligent opinion on events, they wouldn’t necessarily turn to blogs. They would probably still buy one of the weekly current affairs magazines, or read the op-ed pieces in the Times or indeed, the WSJ, possibly online. But there are blog-like alternatives emerging now.

In the world of “blogs” you can get finely written and expert articles on most topics if you know where to find them. At the higher end, blogs are not like newspapers, they are more like authored, opinion columns in newspapers, where a single, authoritative voice expounds on a topic of the moment. That the piece is self-edited is the real distinction. The voice is more able to be itself. If it’s a good one, that’s a real plus.

But this type of column is not really a blog in the commonly understood way. Bob Cringely’s weekly piece over at PBS.org, for example, is more a part of the mainstream than the blogosphere. Online content platforms shouldn’t all be rubbed with the ashes of MySpace. The top end is converging with the mainstream and morphing into it as papers and magazines get digital and learn the tricks of the trade from online journalists and technologists.

There’s no either/or here. Why should there be? Let’s welcome the craft of print to the internet, not forgetting its wealth, and develop our own native pixelcraft to help the mergers along. That’s happening already.

Ultimately, in any field, only 5% succeed, and they can usually do the job anywhere. Blog “culture” will quickly be submerged by the need to present top quality content to a discerning readership, as printed pamphlets were replaced by organized newspapers in the 17th/18th centuries. As more people read online, so will online content reach out to meet them.

Rago and Riley are opposite poles of the debate. As always, the future lies somewhere in between.

It’s good to see the new owners of The Blog Herald bringing in some heavyweight writers.

The latest addition to the new crew is Scott Karp, fresh off the ink at Publishing 2.0, where he writes at length on all aspects of online publishing.

First off is an interesting piece on “user generated content” : is it exploitation, or the legitimate satisfaction of a craving for attention?

The key issue in my mind is how the explosion of user-generated content will affect over the long term how the finite pie of media attention is allocated. If media consumers start to spend more time with user-generated content (i.e. content that is produced “for free” by users of open platforms) than they do with “professional” content (i.e. content that is expensive to produce — think Hollywood), then this issue of allowing users to choose to share in the cash economy will come to a head because the cash value of each user contribution will increase over time.

Scott’s doing a weekly column at TBH. Should be worth following.

On the principle that you can’t beat simplicity and a flash of light, I’ve changed the livery on Syntagma.

We’ll be having a freshly-designed network template in the new year, so I’m basically trying out ideas to see what best fits the ambience.

And, yes, we do have an ambience. Steely, decisive, cutting-edge.

Here’s a first glimpse of the new Syntagma Media corporate logo (proposed).

The Intergalactic Council has a few more to consider, but this is the one I like. Why? Because I designed it.

This means, of course, that all fans of my design style will love it, but the other 99.9% will hate it. But you can’t have everything.

Comments?

Update: Thord has countered with one of his own. I wonder what the Intergalactic Council will make of this :

There’s an interesting and useful article over at USC Online Journalism Review on the top mistakes made by new online publishers by Robert Niles.

I hang my head and admit I’ve made nearly all of them. In fact, as I read the piece, I had an uncanny impression he was writing about me. Paranoid, or what?

The main mistake I hold my hand up to is #5) Telling the world what you are doing… before you actually do it. Former print publishers are particularly prone apparently. Well, whadderyaknow.

Enough mea culpa. If you’re new to online publishing, or even quite experienced, it’s well worth a look.

If, like moi (he says hopefully), you’ve burned off all your mistakes, you can enjoy the warm satisfaction of having been there, done that, and got the body armour.

Before I forget, the redoubtable Bob Cringely has a great article this week on how venture capitalists’ roles have changed in the new Ajaxed internet. As usual, impeccably researched and written.

Lots of juicy chatter around the zlogosphere* about portals and platforms right now. Even Dave Winer is confused so it’s got to be getting serious.

* zlogs are blogs that have outgrown the common or garden blogosphere.

Keith Teare at edgio thinks the big portals, like Yahoo and Google, will gradually retract back from their Himalayan heights to the great wodge in the middle, while the outer edge, comprising small to medium publishers, will become relatively more important. His touchstone is the reported $180,000/month made by TechCrunch.

Scott Karp, who wrote something similar a week ago, believes platforms are the new portals.

Well, it’s old ground here in the zlogosphere as I’ve been banging on about content platforms for quite a while. Mathew Ingram questions the terms used in this discussion. “It’s just the language that is making things difficult. What is a ‘gateway’ or a ‘portal’ or a ‘platform?’ ”

Well, for what it’s worth, here’s Zyntagma Syntagma’s definition of a content platform — or network magazine, as we call them : “A network magazine is a content platform that brings together a range of websites on multi-domains from the same network and which are of interest to a similar readership.”

So the platform is the total distributed inventory within the unit, defined and networked as a magazine, or some other term. The portal is the place where it’s promoted as a single entity. The platform is the whole, the portal is the front page and contents list, to use print terminology.

To clarify that, we have three content platforms and three portals where they receive their organization and package branding.

Scott’s suggested receipts of $180,000/month per platform would give us an annual income of $6.5 million.

Long live the zlogosphere.

Keith Teare has an interesting post over on the Edgio blog, De-portalization and Internet Revenues.

He’s basically saying that the giant portals, like Yahoo and Google will gradually flatten out — see his great mountain graphics — in favour of content platforms from smaller publishers. These will use techniques to drive and distribute traffic flows and collectively become much more important, relatively speaking, than the big players.

Publisher driven revenue models will increasingly replace middlemen. There will be no successful advertiser driven models in the foothills, only publisher centric models. Successful platform vendors will put the publisher at the center of the world in a sellers market for eyeballs. There will be more publishers able to make $180,000 a month [like TechCrunch].

Regular readers will know that this is a viewpoint I’ve been pushing here for some time. He continues :

“Smart [software] companies will (a) help content find traffic by enabling its distribution. (b) help users find content that is widely dispersed by providing great search. (c) help the publishers in the rising foothills maximize the value of their publications.”

I really couldn’t put it better. Our philosophy in a nutshell. Great news that Edgio is going to roll out some supporting products in coming weeks.

One to watch.

We’ve now completed our reorganization plans and will be implementing them across our three network magazines this weekend.

Basically, we are archiving some underperforming sites and we’ve let go eight wonderful one-site authors. This was a difficult decision, but they used up as much admin time as those with many more sites under their belts. With reducing the workload as the main objective, this was painful but necessary.

We have now stabilized to around 35 sites, plus the experimental ones under Syntagma Confidential. With my new contract there’s a distinct possibility of the big retail project going ahead under a different banner, and that will impact favourably on Syntagma too.

We’re now leaner, better organized and much more profitable than before. At the end of my one-year contract with a much larger outfit, Syntagma will be the best li’l network business on the Web.

You’d better believe it.