Syntagma Media is proud to announce the latest of our new book serializations, Steve Newman’s Victorian detective novel, The Crime of the Crimea, due for publication next September.

We begin, however, with a seasonal short story specially written for Syntagma readers, The Great Christmas Train Robbery.

Read it here.

The Great Christmas Train Robbery — Synopsis

Detective Inspector Herbert Merriman Swann hated falling asleep on trains. He also hated waking up on trains that were empty and abandoned in the middle of a snow storm late on Christmas Eve.

Something was wrong, badly wrong.

Can Detective Sergeant John Parker come to his boss’s rescue in time, and stop a heinous crime from taking place? …

The serialization of the novel will begin shortly after Christmas.

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.

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.

When I finally returned from Spain to England, my first thoughts were to publish all the philosophical writing I’d done there. However, a catastrophic fall in the Iberian housing market meant that I needed to make money, not lose it — which is what philosophy famously does.

I decided to utilize my former science background by setting up an educational publishing company — Dial Publishing, specializing in courses on technical writing, editing and publishing. Here’s the cover of our first course :

I also had a book on Technical Writing published by trade publisher, Newnes, now part of William Heinemann. Here it is :

The splendid news for us (me and my business partner) was that the British Government was at the time paying 80pc of students’ fees for accredited courses. After a lot of unnecessary compliance work, ours were accredited. We had six courses in total under the series title of Writing for Business and Technology, all written by yours truly.

However, to justify the name Dial Publishing, I also edited and published a literary quarterly : The Dial. Here’s the cover of the first issue :

This phase rapidly came to a close when HM Gov — in its wisdom — suddenly scrapped the £2 billion ($3.8bn) scheme because, it said, it was being abused by Animal Rights activists. Well, Pooter lives.

After that bombshell it seemed simpler to take to the net where you sank or swam by your own efforts, not at the behest of hopeless ministers and civil servants. And that, folks, was when Syntagma Media came kicking and squealing into the world.

I haven’t mentioned my philosophical books because they’re not quite relevant here. But one is to be published next June by Humdrumming. It’s called : The Nirvaneans — The Natural History of Nirvana.

And that’s not the pop band — although I suppose pop bands could have a natural history since they smoke so much grass.

I’ve also got three short stories coming out in May (again under the Humdrumming imprint) in the form of Naked Tales, another in the series of books produced by our writers’ cabal, Writers Blog Alliance.

But I’m name-dropping too much here. Ah, one name I’ve forgotten, though : Dial Publishing, now the print publishing arm of Syntagma Media, is set to rise again phoenix-fashion from the Ashes urn, with The Syntagma Story — How a Cashstrapper Became a Serial Publisher of Network Magazines.

Not to be missed.

And that ends my short series on one strand in my publishing career to date. Anyone still out there ….?

When you reach a certain age — 19 nowadays — you’re allowed to reminisce a little about your past. Not that I’m anything like 19, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Here’s a picture of the first national (UK) magazine I edited : Network User, all about telecoms and aimed at IT managers of major players like the banks, the London Stock Exchange and others of similar corporate weight.

I developed Network User from a small newsletter called simply, Network. The ugly brute of a burglar on the cover was actually our esteemed designer, Richard Downer, whose previous work included the famous illustrations on the front of Post Office telephone directories.

While we were shooting that pic, he was terrified the police would arrest him for attempted robbery. We had our replies ready : “No officer, I’ve never seen that man in my life.” — at least, that’s what we told him afterwards.

Looking through the magazine now, I still feel almost the same rush of heady excitement as seeing it for the first time, hot off the presses. Maybe because I’m a bit older, but I don’t quite get that same thrill when I look at anything I’ve done online.

Why? It’s too easy.

We sweated blood over that first issue of Network User in a way internet folk can’t imagine unless they’ve done it themselves.

We had a huge budget, employed the best people in their fields, were paid large salaries and had the run of late 1980s London, a place literally sizzling with excitement — probably something like Silicon Valley in its heyday.

Those were the days. We were Monarchs of all we surveyed and drove all before us. Champions, indeed.

But even great decades run their course. The flashy 80s were replaced by the boring 90s, and I headed to an isolated farmhouse in southern Spain with a nice view of Gibraltar and the Med. There I spent my time writing philosophy and growing avocados, apricots and figs.

Returning to England seven years later and wondering what to do with myself, I fell into the Web and blogging and started doing much the same as I’d done before. That is, producing network magazines.

So events turn full circle in the end. What creatures of habit we are.

A reminder that our 2006 Writer’s Blog Anthology in book form is now available from Amazon, thanks to the hard work of Deborah Woehr, who edited and designed it, as well as pushing it through the publishing process.

Having just received my copy, which was printed by Lightning Source, I must report that the quality of printing and production is amazing for an on-demand book. Too often POD (print on demand) books look and feel trashy and badly produced. The Anthology is indistinguishable from a good trade paperback.

It also contains some fine writing from a wide range of authors. The work was submitted from blog posts written by members of Writers’ Blog Alliance, all of whom are writers in one form or another.

This would make a great gift for anyone who likes a good read, or who is caught up in blogging.

Buy it here from Amazon.

In a recent comment here, Jeremy Wright of b5media claimed I’ve been saying nothing but “content is King”.

So let me expand on that, and excuse me for going over old Web n.0 ground again. “Content is King” is early Web and real world. Web 2.0, has been largely about flashy presentation and so-called community values, more properly interpreted as “collective”, or socialist, ideology.

Web 3.0 will leave the leftist politics behind and loudly proclaim : “Metacontent is Emperor”. The Semantic Web will be about making new connections between content to make it more usable by “the next five billion” users, who will be the folk who visit retail sites, like Amazon, to buy stuff, and occasionally use Google to search for a product, service, or answer to an exam question.

By metacontent I don’t mean machine-aggregated snippets related to traffic, or dud “voting” extravaganzas. I mean areas where choice and editorial control make human sense of the mass of data coming at us every second.

“Portals” are the buzz word now in online publishing. Portals are metacontent aiming to simplify our choices of what to read and what to do. Almost every blog network is developing portals nowadays. By Jove we’ve even done it ourselves, although we call them network magazines.

That’s so their purpose is understandable to every single individual who lands on them. Everybody knows what a magazine is, but some may be confused by “portal”. It also tells the visitor something : there’s a human interface here — an editor — and the content will be of the level you would expect in a good paper mag.

Metacontent forms a content platform, above the actual content it serves, to give it more meaning and provide more pathways through it, the very aims of the Semantic Web. So Jeremy was being ingenuous in ignoring the layered effect. Of course, we haven’t finished with the magazine format. There’s a long way to go before the ultimate vision is realized — Web 4.0, perhaps?

Recently, over at Bloggertalks, I wrote about Digital Maoism, the aspired-for Will of the Collective, sometimes rose-tinted as the Wisdom of the Crowd. You’re welcome to substitute “mob” if you’d prefer. This is the aim of Web 2.0 as expressed by Tim O’Reilly — the collective intelligence of mankind is, I believe, the ultimate goal. The history of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao tells us all we need to know about that.

C.G. Jung, who lived through it all from his base in Switzerland, wrote “the individual is the sole carrier of life”. He meant, of course, as observed from a human perspective. Once you let that principle slip, by unleashing the dogs of collective intelligence, you set free every ghastly, super-energized ego on the planet who has the personal objective of total domination and control. Bill Thompson has a great piece in The Register just now, seen from the point of view of a developer.

Now I’m not saying that network magazines are going to solve all these problems, but they are a small pointer to the re-emergence of individual excellence and people-guidance in small distributed parts of the internet. It’s a principle I call Superdemocracy : decisionmaking at the point of maximum competence, which is almost always below the level where decisions are taken now.

The crucial words here are “excellence” and “competence”, not a vague vox pop in which you only have to have two legs and some sort of head to feature on prime-time. In England, we call that “Buggins’s turn” — the idea that all shall have prizes and no-one shall fail, no matter how useless they are. Tony Blair’s Britain is built on that nonsense, and just look at it.

So content is not just King, it also has to be shaped and arranged by people who know what they’re doing and can be held personally accountable for it. In other words, what used to be called “civilization”.

That means editors are not dead, and publishing skills will prevail on the internet over the wayward tidal flows of aggregated popular opinion.

Metacontent is Emperor and Empress.

Syntagma Media is in lunar orbit at launching the third (and final) network magazine in the current series.

LifeTimes packages all of our Lifestyles and Celebrities sites under one roof, with an editor’s pick of posts and a rolling feed from around the mag.

As ever, it’s been designed by Swedish superstar, Thord Hedengren, who has woven his usual miracles of speed and panache.

We’ve introduced another feature in the form of an Editorial box to bring you the latest news from the network magazine world. At present, of course, that just means Syntagma.

Don’t think we’re lonely up here. We enjoy being in lunar orbit.

Can’t think of anything that rhymes, so just curl up with LifeTimes.

Damn, that doesn’t scan!