After all the excitement of the launch of b5media’s portal page, including The Blog Herald’s extensive low-impact coverage, we can announce that we are working on three new Network Magazines :

* Mind, Body, Spirit — title to be announced.
* Finance and Investment — title TBA.
* Automotive matters — title TBA.

These will join our soon-to-be launched triumvirate of mags : Allusionz, LifeTimes and 21st-century Phi, whose portals we are currently working on.

The three new proposals will be launched February through April, meeting our target of six Network Magazines in our second year of operations.

Our quickening pace of growth, however, means we may well comfortably exceed our initial targets.

Syntagma Media is pleased to announce the launch of our newest site, The History Man.

So, who is the history man? It’s none other than Steve Newman, an historian and a prolific author on our network, with sites like, A Publisher’s Diary, Jazz Groove, and A Literary Life.

The History Man will range over Steve’s view of history from the Middle Ages to the present day. He begins with a series on the comparative history of Britain and the USA.

The site forms part of our new Allusionz Network Magazine which covers the arts and philosophies.

If you’re a lover of history, this is well worth visiting regularly.

After a year or two as a dedicated denizen of the blogosphere, it’s easy to forget how baffling it all was in the beginning.

Cast your mind back to those first tentative steps into the magical realm of Blogspot, where everything was inexplicably free and you could do almost anything you liked. Er, except that you couldn’t, because you didn’t know how to.

Remember the questions? How do you get pictures in posts? How do people get things into the sidebar and space them out neatly? What in tarnation is RSS? Why do I need a “feed” when I’ve just had lunch?

It all seemed so hopeless then.

Of course, those of us who stuck with it, absorbed all this stuff by a mysterious process of osmosis and trial and error. Amazingly, there were no books to refer to in those days, just totally inadequate FAQs and incomprehensible “explanations” written by geeky engineers.

So try to imagine your average bod arriving at a typical Web 2.0 bloggy website calling itself a “social network”. The culture shock and sense of alienation must be absolute. Even I reel at the thought of the learning curves needed to access sites like Lulu and De.licio.us (does anyone realize that’s a complete URL?).

So I was delighted to come across a post by Stephen Baker over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting, called Web 3.0. It’s all about cracking open Web 2.0, he opines, under three points. Here’s one of them :

Only a fraction of humanity has anything to do with Web 2.0. Others stay to the sidelines because they find the technology too confusing or expensive, or they don’t see the relevance. Bring another billion or so people into Web 2.0, and Metcalfe’s Law alone will make it a radically different phenomenon.

Those of us who are already working on taming the wilder outreaches of Web 2.0 by, for example, converting blog networks into various Network Magazines (you knew I’d get to it in the end), are, by Baker’s definition, working in Web 3.0.

How old bowler Web 2.0 now seems.

All this is by way of introducing our third Network Magazine, now in the planning stages, 21st-century Phi, which will cover science and technologies, including modern ones like ecology and parapsychology.

All so very Web 3.1.

Reuters is reporting today that Penguin has bought the content of Catherine Sanderson’s blog, La Petite Anglaise, to publish it in book form. The acquisition is now the most hotly-discussed topic at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Penguin’s publisher, Katy Follain, commented: “The blogs should be almost incidental to us as publishers. We need to look at the writing itself. Her writing is so strong we signed her for two books.”

A mid-six-figure sum has been floated as the advance on Anglaise.

Rival publisher, MacMillan’s Chief Executive Richard Charkin writes on his own blog : “I’m not quite sure what a mid-six-figure sum is, but let’s imagine £500,000 ($942,700) and let’s assume that non-UK rights are about the same. It means that the book will have to sell around a million copies to earn back the advance.”

Reuters reports : “Some blogs-turned-books have been hits with readers, but publishers could not recall any that had reached such a lofty sales tally.”

Indeed many have had disappointing sales because the immediacy and transient nature of blog posts don’t sit well with the permanency of the book format. Blogs that translate successfully into books, are usually written as books by book authors, or at least rewritten for a different medium.

It’s interesting that Penguin’s publisher says that the blog is irrelevant, it’s the quality and strength of the writing that counts.

Blogs have a very different presence to that of books. In some cases, they’re closer to newspapers. Reportage blogs do very well if written by a well-informed and intelligent journalist. Most blogs, though, more easily resemble magazines, having content that’s useful and less transient than the newsy outfits.

The big publishers clearly know what they’re doing here — more so than the bloggers. They will have to invest a significant sum of money to publish a blog in print. They can’t afford to be impulsive amateurs.

As I’m often saying these days, blogs can be many things. It’s important to know what.