I’m delighted to announce that Arie Kraai, a Dutch journalist and writer, has taken over on our Digital Camera Latest site.

Digicams are becoming an important market these days, making a big dent in the world’s budget for gadgets. In the run-up to Christmas, a click or two will take you to the top retailers of digital cameras and accessories. We’ll even have a special shop onsite to cater for all your needs.

Syntagma is rolling out a series of new websites in the first week or two of September.

* Horse & Event — Jane Phillipps on horsemanship.
* Big-ticket cars in our Auto Exotica site
* Green Gardening with Douglas Green
* Windjammer, our long-awaited sailing reprise
* A Literary Life by Steve Newman
* On the Money — Fiscal and Monetary Trends
* Arunachala Spirit, in which Meenakshi Mammi will blog direct from the mystical mountain of Arunachala in southern India.

All in all, a great new package of riveting websites for our Fall-Autumn Season.

Stick with Syntagma, because you know you’re worth it.

It’s a well-known fact that “Web 2.0″ design fads — the smoothly-refreshing AJAX, the ease of syndication, and those maddening widgets drowning in OPML — seriously reduce page views.

Since advertising is mostly sold on page views, it follows that commercial websites should avoid the latest pointy hairdos (figuratively speaking).

Evan Williams discusses the problems of page views and other metrics in a wide-ranging article that’s been much commented on. Here’s a snippet from it that caught my ever-watchful eye :

“… part of the reason MySpace drives such an amazing number of pageviews is because their site design is so terrible.”

Say no more, Evan.

I much prefer Chris Pearson’s idea of Information Architecture to snazzy effects, and simple utility to “design”.

This is my answer to Matt Craven’s Blog Herald podcast in which he touches on Syntagma’s rebadging as a Web Network Magazine.

So, what *is* the internet for? Is it a giant train set for geeks to play with? Is it simply another publishing tool for publishing folk? The answer is both, of course. The problem lies in the interface between the two.

The question that Matt brings up yet again — naturally — is, what is a blog network? Subsidiary questions that arise here include, should a blog network confine itself to the blogosphere? ; are hybrid models acceptable? (to whom?) ; and can a blog network transform itself so that it becomes something else?

The answers must be either : No, Yes and Yes, or we live in a police state.

Generally there are two kinds of user in the professional/commercial blogosphere. Those whose business (or main interest) is the internet itself : the hardware, the software, the services, and something called Web 2.0.

The other users are essentially publishers. They don’t care much about the platform — they pay others to worry about that — but their business uses the internet as a publishing tool without obsessing, or even knowing much, about it.

The former will have businesses beginning with Blog- or The Blog XXXXXX. Words like blogosphere and blog network loom large in their daily round.

The latter will have businesses that draw on words like media, publishing, magazine. In some senses they are the future of the internet, because the original geek base which created it is getting smaller by the hour in proportion to the whole (as Duncan Riley pointed out last year).

When a blog network starts up it’s usually driven by the tech set. Weblogs Inc was started by technology watchers and technologists, while b5media has a systems engineer as CEO, and three other directors whose sole concern is working in, consulting on, and writing about, the internet, especially the blogosphere.

Now that’s perfectly fine. Who else would start a blog network apart from people who had some interest in the platform? The problem comes though at the next stage of development (see my earlier post on this). A blog network is essentially a hybrid beast developing within the techy world of open-source software, but reaching out to the world of publishing generally.

Consequently, any network that doesn’t make the transition from serverside to general readership is doomed to remain an incestuous half-formed creature feeding off its own offal.

A blog network must develop a personality in the way a magazine does. Without a bonding element and a common thread it’s just an incoherent link farm of bits and pieces. Numbers don’t count here, it’s the whole package, its brand and cohesion that form the public face of its product.

Then it has to have quality content of a high professional standard that non-blogospherics want to read. You can serve geeks only, of course — TechCrunch is a fine example — but how many TechCrunches can the market bear? TechCrunch is a big fish in shallow waters.

For a blog network to take root it has to transform itself into something recognizable to a much wider audience, a magazine, for instance. The CEO and others have to leave their technology past behind and become publishers, with all the traditional skills that publishers have. Otherwise they will suddenly hit a wall where their arts are no longer good enough for the next stage up.

Syntagma Media’s conversion from a blog network to a Web Network Magazine was inevitable at some stage. We’ve done it sooner than most, that’s all. Coincidentally, its CE (yours truly) was an author and publisher in a previous pre-blogosphere existence.

I predict many of the others will follow us down this route in time. If they don’t, they’re doomed.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

The Blog Herald is chatting about Syntagma Media in its weekly podcast. I haven’t had the chance to listen to it yet, so I hope I’m not driving you into the flames.

It seems they’re discussing our decision to reposition the network as a Web Network Magazine rather than a blog network. Of course, as a business exclusively aimed at blogging, BlogMedia (owner of The Blog Herald) is defending its patch. Our move must seem like apostasy to them.

The problem lies not with the blogosphere itself (it’s amazing) but that once you get into the commercial side of it, you find that “blogging” is not associated in the wider public’s mind with “shopping” or even “finding accurate, in-depth information”.

We’re aiming for this wider audience. Bloggers rarely click on ads — that’s a truism. People searching on products and services, on the other hand, do. It’s as simple as that. We’re now a business, not a blog; a media operation, not individuals shouting to get a word in edgeways.

As I posted under Are there three blogospheres? there are areas where the blogosphere shades into mainstream media. It happens at the fringes of the tertiary and commercial blogospheres. Syntagma is positioning itself there to draw in a wider audience.

We are a business, and we will continue pushing the envelope as we go. The “blogosphere” can easily become your jailer if you allow it to mask all other opportunities.