I’m getting a few queries about our new portal pages for our three network magazines, Allusionz, LifeTimes and 21st-century Phi, so here’s an update.

The first portal, Allusionz, is now well underway and looking good. It’s being designed by an excellent, but as yet unnamed Web designer, who’s making all the right decisions along the way.

I’m very happy with progress so far, and it looks like it just may get launched this month — way ahead of any schedule I’d been working to.

The other two should follow swiftly as they’ll use more or less the same code.

Following that, our shadowy design guru will create a new template for the whole network, which should be fun. The portals will then be updated with new graphical links and the overall concept finally revealed.

Thord Hedengren’s Bloggertalks is rapidly becoming a must-read spot for anyone interested in online publishing.

Today, Mike Rundle of 9rules makes an appearance in a wide-ranging interview in which he talks frankly about the 9rules model and its development. He has some fascinating ideas about blog networks, as here :

“I think all blog networks should drop what they’re doing, stop adding new blogs, and immediately focus on how best to get content into the hands of their users because that’s what really matters. I’d really like to see some more user-focused content portals emerge because that’s what people are expecting now.”

Agreed.

Incidentally, Syntagma will be launching the first of our new portals soon.

Read the interview here.

Warning : Huge tangential diversion coming up.

If you’re American you may not remember much about the summer of 2005. If you’re English, you’ll have instant recall of almost every passing, nail-biting minute.

It started with triumph. An announcement that London had won the 2012 Olympic Games amazed the nation — we don’t normally win that sort of thing. Everybody was in party mood. The media was throbbing with excitement.

That euphoric moment turned to ashes the very next day. England’s long-expected 9/11 arrived at last. 7/7 saw the quadruple bombing of the London Underground, or Tube as it’s known locally, and a single bus full of people. Fifty-two people died and around 700 were maimed or injured.

To call these events a rollercoaster ride is something of an understatement. Never was the mood of one city turned on its head so swiftly. But rollercoaster was the only word to describe the rest of the summer, thanks to one astonishing, almost archetypal, sporting event. The Battle for the Ashes 2005.

The Ashes is a small urn containing the burned remains of a set of cricket bails, some say stumps, that were incinerated when Australia first beat England at the greatest game on earth back in 1888, or some such distant epoch.

Now they were up for grabs again in a tussle between the world’s best cricketers, the Aussies, who hardly ever lost, and a young England team that was fit, well-led and bursting with spirit.

The rest is sporting history, for only an Ashes test series can be called Titanic. Why? Because it lasts for 25 days spread over five, five-day matches, played out over a whole summer.

Never have fortunes swung with such scintillating rapidity. When one team gained mastery, the other fought back with such guile and determination that the very opposite occurred barely minutes later. It was breathtaking and truly heart-stopping. Many people had heart attacks that season. It was a good year for cardiac specialists.

On and on it went, tension so great that even the Queen said she couldn’t bear to watch it. And she was supposed to support each of the sides, since she’s Monarch of both.

England won in the end, but it went to the final day at The Oval Cricket Ground. Had Australia held England to a draw, they would have taken the series and the Ashes, but it was Kevin Pietersen’s flashing blade that carried the day for England in true spectacular, Nelsonian fashion.

England had just committed itself to maybe £20 billion ($38 billion) to host a dreary set of amateur sporting events spread over three weeks seven years away. Yet it had just hosted the finest sporting summer ever witnessed by mere mortals, and it cost nothing.

I won’t describe it again, for you can read it here on Syntagma — the Blog of Record.

Now the return series is about to take place in Australia over a longer and much-hotter down-under summer. The Aussies have won nine of their last ten test matches and seem poised to regain those precious Ashes. England have had mixed fortunes, and lots of injuries, including to their inspirational skipper, Michael Vaughan and the irrepressible Freddy Flintoff, the new captain.

Will it be as great a series as 2005? Will it be as close? Who will win?

I can only quote the fallen American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in one of his more pithy moments :

There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

He means, stuff happens.

Syntagma Media has been asked to sponsor the new Stratford International Festival of Literature in Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, England, next year. We are very happy to do so.

The Festival organizer, Steve Newman, is aiming to create a cultural phenomenon along the lines of the Cheltenham and Hay-on-Wye literary bashes, which attract people like Bill Clinton, Martin Amis and others.

The event will be held over a long weekend next autumn / fall and will be sponsored by Humdrumming Ltd in addition to ourselves.

If you fancy coming, we’ll keep you informed of plans and booking arrangments. Join the mailing list by shooting an email to info(at)StratfordLitFest(dot)com.

Update: There’s now a Syntagma website for the Festival here.

Doing a bit of preliminary research for the three upcoming portal pages for our Network Magazines, I stumbled on a rather obvious fact — obvious if you think about it, that is.

People click many times more often on the graphical links on this site than they do on the text links between sites on our other inventory. Syntagma is the only one of our sites which boasts a full graphical representation of the whole network. On all other sites, we just have a textual “blogroll”.

Even allowing for the higher traffic levels here than on most of our other sites, the advantage of a graphical link is shown to be very strong.

Reproducing the Syntagma sidebar across the network, though, would take up valuable pixels assigned to advertising, which is why we don’t do it.

Warning : Those who continually complain about the array of colours in our sidebar, had better avoid our new portal pages. They will be there in all their glory.

We will, though, round off the corners and, since there will be fewer titles in each mag, they’ll be larger and more interesting.

Oh, and more colourful too.

Mind how you go.

Bloggertalks.com, a Swedish Wordpress website developed by two Blog Herald writers, has just launched with an interview with yours truly on the front page. I notice Liz Strauss is there too.

Bloggertalks is run by Thord Daniel Hedengren (who also designed it) with help from Tony Hung. They say : “Bloggertalks is a blog about bloggers who matter, what they do and their experiences. We’re acting as the middle man here, talking to them and doing interviews, so that you — the dear reader — can learn. Twice a week. Our goal is to tell the stories of all the successful bloggers out there, and the companies and services that revolves around them. Not all of them make a lot of money, but sometimes you can get rich in other ways and we’re acknowledging that.”

The site is publishing within the Pale Portal network, which in turn is published under the Pale Publishing brand, owned by Swedish company Cylinder Labs AB.

Syntagma Media is also talking to Thord about some new Swedish design on our forthcoming magazine portal pages. More Ercol than Ikea, I guess.

Catch the interview here, where I’m talking about — yes, you’re right — Network Magazines.

It’s a big subject.

Patrick Gavin has just emailed to announce that Text Link Ads (TLA) has been acquired by New York ad agency, MediaWhiz. The business will move from Cincinnati to the Big Apple over coming months. It will, says Patrick, be business as usual.

I am excited to announce that Text Link Ads Inc will be joining forces with MediaWhiz. This will bring some exciting changes to our platform. Here is how this will benefit you in the coming months…

Publishers: by leveraging MediaWhiz’s agency relationships and sales staff we will be able to sell more ad space on your website. We also will be adding the ability to monetize your website in new ways including: CPA offers and CPM display advertising.

Advertisers: TLA will be working with MediaWhiz to offer new ways to drive traffic and sales to your website including: email marketing, CPA offers, CPM display ads and more!

This is a great little company that deserves to get bigger, and we at Syntagma wish Patrick and all the folks there the very best of fortune in the future.

Update: There’s more over at TechCrunch.

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.

The new b5media portal page is now live.

There are many good things about it, which I’ll deal with first. I also have one slight reservation, which I’ll leave till last.

It’s very businesslike and has a professional feel to it. Designed by Ben Bleikamp (according to The Blog Herald), the page delivers all the right buttons to click and has a lot of white space which makes it easy on the eye.

It’s minimalist, bordering on severe, making it functional and simple to use. No hoops to jump through, no messy widgets or Flash ads sliding across the screen. Satisfying is the word that comes to mind.

There’s a random channel dip that gives you a selection of posts, and a list of the 14 channels to right, plus a list of headlines down the middle. Everything else is off-page just a click away. The random nature of the channel dip, though, means that you’ll see one thread out of 14 every time you land on the page. Chances are it won’t be one that interests you. Statistically, that’s not a great way of doing it.

Generally, I like the information architecture and the way it doesn’t strain for effect. Technically, it’s A-OK.

Well, OK. I’ve used up my Saturday morning stock of good fellowship. A nagging thought is niggling away in the darker regions of my brain. “Hey, isn’t that all rather boring?”

Alas and alack, in creating a nice page, informative, clean and open, they’ve forgotten that they are a content company, a publisher, not just an impeccably managed internet business.

There are no pictures, no enticements to surf the inventory, not even the slightest razmatazz that might just lure a reader to the content. It could just as well be a train timetable.

Unless, of course, the 14 channels are to have portal pages of their own, but I doubt that. They remain simple category slots : amalgamated content with no branding.

Now, I never expected them to go the whole magazine route that we’re taking, but where oh where is the personality? Where are the publishing skills that turn words on a page into must-read content? Are they relying on search alone? Do they expect to be regarded as a publication at all? Is this just a technical exercise to secure advertising and backers and then sell it off as a bare-bones product that can easily be adapted by a future buyer?

In its present form it’s unclear who would buy it — but then I thought YouTube was unsaleable. My instinct, for what it’s worth, is that b5media is an operating company with no definable product except a sprawling empire of words and other content that relies on size alone to draw attention.

I know it’s not for me to lecture these smart guys who have a lot of experience in other aspects of the internet, but really, where are the publishing hooks to snare and guide the readers?

No print publication survives in these frantic times by being low key and unexceptional. The b5ers desperately need to inject some magic into their content presentation, or they’ll never get beyond the size of their network as the defining factor of b5media.

Apart from that, 9 out of 10.

And I’ve left myself wide open to retaliation when our three magazine portal pages go up. That’s the blogosphere for you. Mind how you go.