The spectacular advent of New Media in the last few years has had a substantial impact on communications for those of us who like to communicate that way.

However, unlike the “evangelists”, I’ve always felt it’s been largely played out around the edges of the mainstream and remains a fringe activity still. The mainstream provides the journalists, editors and publishers; blogs etc. provide the stringers.

Getting excited about people getting excited is not a valid business case.

The current fashion for podcasts and vidblogs is another new fad yet to prove itself in the real world, at least on centre-stage.

My own view is that life is too short for podcasts and endless snippets of poor quality video about people making fools of themselves. Bundling them all onto normal blogs only makes the platform virtually unusable and overly-complicated.

So how are these “technologies” doing in the commercial world?

Recently we had Evan Williams’s confession that his podcast outfit, Odeo, was struggling. Manfully, he blamed himself – but might not the market bear some responsibility too?

Now BlogExplosion, the traffic-generating social network, has announced it’s giving up on podcasts and vidblogs on its already heaving website. The latest email newsletter reports : “Shortly after we created it, it seemed apparent that BlogExplosion really wasn’t the place for podcasts and vidcasts. For that reason, we have decided that effective October 1st, 2006, we will be retiring the podcasts area of BlogExplosion.”

I’ve also noticed that Robert Scoble — recently headhunted by a Valley podcast startup is beginning to question whether the geek base is enough of an audience. He probably senses that to address a wider listenership they will have to match mainstream reach, quality and technical sophistication. Can he become a Ted Turner overnight? Doubtful.

So are we seeing the end of phase 1 of the pod/vid craze? The answer is almost certainly yes.

Is there a Pod 2.0 out there waiting for the evangelists to grab? Yes, but only if they scale up to broadcast standards. Otherwise it’s just geeks playing with toys and talking to each other in an echo-chamber.

But what, I can hear you shouting, about Youtube, surely a massive success for Video blogging? Well, venture capitalist Mark Cuban has just posted about “The coming dramatic decline of YouTube”.

Considering the RIAA will sue your grandma or a 12 year old at the drop of a hat, the fact that Youtube is building a traffic juggernaut around copyrighted audio and video without being sued is like…. well Napster at the beginning as the labels were trying to figure out what it meant to them. [...]

Take away all the copyrighted material and you take away most of Youtube’s traffic. Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal. Like any number of competitors out there that decided to follow copyright law.

He ends his post : “Youtube, we hardly knew you.”

A fitting epitaph for yet another tubular bubble on the internet. But, in reality it’s just another ending before another beginning. Some folk have stretched the envelope and come up against the law of the land and the complexity issues of real media operation.

Jason Calacanis has also weighed in with : “… we all know that YouTube is on the brink of extinction.” And his parent company, Time Warner, has just agreed to supply its own videos to YouTube. Mysterious.

These technologies will be taken up, but in the proper setting of high-end, high-class, big media. Unless the little ones learn to scale up and comply with the law, they will just bounce off the granite cliff face inhabited by the big boys.

In the longer term these new media will either remain as serious games for the dedicated amateur, or they will develop mainstream excellence and become part of it.

Pythagoras’s Theorem has 24 words.
The Lord’s Prayer — 66 words.
Archimedes Principle — 67 words.
The Ten Commandments — 179 words.
The Gettysburg Address — 286 words.
New European Union rules for the sale of cabbages — 26,253 words.

From the Parish Magazine of St. Mary Magdalen, Chulmleigh, Devon, UK.

For our first Saturday treat we have a real corker. It’s Roger Scruton’s piece in today’s Times (London) about the need for conservation in politics. As a life-long Burkean, this article says it all for me :

Caring for one’s country – a naturally green aim for a conservative party

Roger Scruton’s new book, A Political Philosophy, has just been published by Continuum.

Making comparisons of online and offline magazines is difficult we’re told. Apples and oranges, some say. But apples and oranges have more similarity than difference. They are spherical and roughly the same size. They’re classified as fruit, often eaten as dessert, contain vitamins and antioxidants and despised by children.

So let’s try to make some sort of comparison between magazines.

There are two types of online magazine :

* Deep, where a single website is developed into a complex structure holding many types of content and advertising.

* Wide, where distributed sites, usually on separate domains, each cover a single, niche topic area.

The advantages of the latter are said to be better search engine optimization and increased linkage possibilities, plus the sites don’t have to be launched all at once with a full staff in place. They can be built up gradually over time, with multiple cost savings.

The wide variety, like Syntagma, are becoming quite popular now, and are often referred to as “blog networks”, a name that gives a false impression of what they are capable of being.

In terms of comparisons with print magazines, Syntagma has 20 or so sites averaging up to 1000 visitors a day, and another 25 newer ones with much less than that. One thousand a day rolls out to 30,000 a month.

In print terms, 30,000 readers for a monthly magazine would work out around 10,000 copies sold — an average of three people read each copy. Over the top 20 sites, that’s the equivalent of 200,000 copies a month. Add on 50,000 for the other 25 newer sites, and you have a “print sale” of a quarter of a million copies per month, which is very respectable for a popular, upper-mid-ranking print title.

Add to that our growth rate of 300pc+ per year and the comparison becomes intriguing.

Differences? There are a few. Syntagma is given away free, supported only by advertising. But, whereas a free sheet in the print market is rarely taken seriously, a website has to be consciously accessed, so carries more weight.

My point is that our readers are all volunteers. They turn up because they want to, not because we stick it through their doors. The free/paid distinction is therefore meaningless online. We can compare our numbers directly with paid-for, off-the-newsstand magazines.

I’m often asked about the demographic of our readership. The beauty of the “wide” model is that different sites cater for different demographics. For example, we used to have a fairly elderly British audience at Royal Anecdotes until we changed its direction to following the antics of the younger members of the Royal family. Now the site gets flooded with younger traffic from forums following Prince William, Prince Harry and their girlfriends. Amazingly, 80pc of that traffic now comes from the USA.

Comparisons are odious, it’s said, but only to the losing side. It is possible to compare and contrast off- and online publishing enterprises. Interestingly, the newer online press often comes off better in terms of readership. The trends are good in some respects, but are thought to be less so in others.

As more people go online, they will become familiar with sourcing their information needs from the internet. This can only grow the market substantially.

The exponential increase in mobile technology, which on the surface might work against us — why would anyone want to read the Wall Street Journal on their mobile phone? — may actually boost web magazines because they are specifically adapted to the screen. Moreover, in the Far East, the Japanese and Koreans are quite happy to read whole novels on small, iPod-like devices.

In my view, though, nothing will replace the book for sheer convenience : you don’t have to plug it in, replace batteries, or search for a WiFi connection. But magazines are less convenient, increasingly costly, and many are migrating online, if only to bolster the stats of their print versions. This is not a Road to Damascus conversion.

Developing a built-for-purpose, online-only, native magazine industry is a market waiting to happen, if only blog network owners can wake up and smell the burning newsprint.

It’s not so much about technology, but user interface design and old-fashioned publishing skills.

That capable gent Evan Williams, he who built Blogger.com into an organization big enough to interest Google, which now owns it, has made a full confession of the mistakes he made with his newish podcast company, Odeo.

GigaOm reports on his speech to a conference in which he admits that Odeo hasn’t yet settled on a business model — very Web 2.0.

In a much linked-to piece last year, Williams listed 10 points for startup success. Two of them were : Be Narrow, and Be Tiny. He now confesses he lost sight of these injunctions as CEO of Odeo.

Other points of failure include :

“Trying to build too much” – Odeo set out to be a podcasting company with no focus beyond that.

This is fairly typical of the idea that if you build big enough, Yahoo or Rupert Murdoch will come knocking on your door.

“Not building for people like ourselves” – Williams doesn’t podcast himself, and, as a result, the company’s web-based recording tools were too simplistic.

Playing to audiences you don’t understand is asking for trouble.

“Not adjusting fast enough” – The company thought its comprehensive web-based strategy would win out over the competition, primarily Apple, in the long term. “It turns out long term is not soon enough for a startup if you’re trying to get a foothold.”

Never try to take on the big boys, at least at first. Hubris is as much a killer in business as it is in politics.

“Raising too much money too early” – Williams seeded the company with $170,000 of his own money. He then obtained over a million in angel funding, only to be offered $3 million from Charles River Ventures. They took the cash.

Using cash-flow techniques is essential for all startups. Bootstrapping may sound unadventurous but it builds sound finance until you’ve got good sales going.

“Not listening to my gut” When you’ve got a bunch of money and you’ve hired a lot of people and you’re talking to your board and you’re talking to reporters, your gut can get drowned out.

At least he knows where he went wrong. His honesty does him credit and may just redeem the situation.

But what price the Web 2.0 bubble now?

[Health Warning] At the risk of causing serious heart flutters among the febrile souls who have been writing furiously about our “desertion” of the blog network space, I’m going to key-in a few words about Web Network Magazines.

Syntagma is now developing slowly into a slightly different entity, aiming at a slightly different, but still online, readership. Change is not lightning fast because there’s just one owner and two helpers on the office side.

The date set for a first beta version of the magazine is our one-year anniversary, October 21, although you’ll see changes progressively until then.

I don’t know why bloggers are fretting over the dropping of the word “blog”. Many new blog-supporting websites and networks have been doing the same for a few years now. MSN Spaces was conceived without using the word. MySpace doesn’t exactly make a feature of its blog connections, either.

So let’s just get away from that word and start looking at the space inclusively, rather than in an elitist blogospheric context. Heather Green has got an interesting post today over at BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting. Heather writes :

My relatives use the Internet. They’re I think the perfect example of mass market use of the Internet. They send out email chains and check all the popular traditional news sites. They probably visit blogs, but don’t know the difference between them and the other sites they go to. … blog software probably needs to get simpler and more readily available for them to get that part of it.

But then I thought, do they need to blog? … So even as I am confronted with the growth of these technologies, I still think that they are too techie. People can adapt overtime, but why should they? The software should adapt to them.

Here we have the crux of it : a vast army of internet users who don’t know what a blog is, or why it should even exist. Yet, they are customers who shop on the internet, and google up information for a variety of needs.

If you label your product a “blog” network, most new arrivals on your site won’t know what you’re talking about. Ergo, best give them a description they can readily understand.

So why not “magazine”?

Syntagma Media has finally launched a sailing website : Windjammer — Discovering Sailing, authored by Douglas Green, who also writes our Green Gardening site.

Douglas describes his virtual voyage on the Syntagma Ship o’ the Line thusly :

“My sailing area is one of the best in the fresh-water sailing world. The eastern end of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River 1000 islands sailing region houses some of the best racing and cruising you can imagine. There’s a long and storied history of sailing down here and I can only marvel at some of the stories.

“I’ll also be writing about other things I love in the sailing world. Like travelling south (Hey, I live in Canada — it’s really, really hard to take a Folkboat out on frozen water) and seeing some of the museums and sailing adventures down there.”

Sounds like one to steer for if you’re an Old Salt or would-be Master Mariner.

Syntagma Media is tickled pink green to announce our first website firmly embedded in the soil.

Green Gardening with Douglas Green (even the name fits) is all about … well, Douglas tells it better than I can :

Blogs are fun things — you can write what suits you and publish it right away - post pictures and generally share interesting bits of information with other gardeners.

I’ve been doing this sharing in various ways for most of my gardening life. Both in my own nursery where I used to run seminars and through my radio, television and writing work. The Internet simply lets us write in a more direct way to our readers.

Now I’m a full time garden writer — working on a wide range of magazine, book and Internet writing — that is when I’m not out building new gardens and trialing new plants. (My kids have a case of beer bet on how long it will take me to completely remove all the grass from the front lawn) .

This blog is about new plants, new environmentally sound techniques and almost anything that crosses my desk or grows in my garden that I’d like to share with you.

We’ve written a lot in Syntagma about Windows Vista and what it will mean for Microsoft as a business and as an increasingly monolithic company.

Now John Naughton of the UK’s Observer Sunday newspaper has spelt out the future with some clarity. First, though, you have to bear in mind that The Observer is a “left wing” paper, so has a natural affinity with the open-source software model. With desk-top Linux as it is, however, it’s not at all clear that the future lies there. But let’s keep an open mind about that.

Naughton describes the slow agony of the Vista development process very well. “Never again”, is his sensible conclusion. The fault, he rightly says, is the perceived need for “backward compatibility” (using old files and processes) which stifles innovation, plus Vista’s monolithic architecture which had to be scrapped in 2004 and completely reworked.

Naughton then zeros-in on Virtualization — “a key technology that enables a single machine to run several operating systems (or modules thereof) in parallel — to deal with the backwards compatibility problem.”

“Virtualization is the Next Big Thing in computing, and the lesson of Vista is that Microsoft will have to embrace it to survive in the operating system market.”

The problem for Microsoft is that the leader in the technology is Xensource, a company that began life in Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory. Ironically, not only is the lab housed in the William Gates Building, but Xen’s core technology is open source. Eventually, when a deal is done with Microsoft, Xensource could become the most sought-after company on the planet.

Isn’t this a good investment opportunity then? Not so fast. “If you were thinking of investing, however, I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat. John Doerr, the world’s greatest venture capitalist (Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Lotus, Intuit, Genentech, Millennium, Netscape, Amazon and Google, inter alia), got there before you.”

So the “Syntagma Solution” is probably on the cards after all?