A great slide on the differences between developing a business in Europe and in Silicon Valley from Mårten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL. I'm particularly interested to see him highlight the last three points. (click to see the original image at Flickr).

Things have just kicked off here in Brussels at EuroOSCON. If you happen to be here then please do ping me - peter at webkitchen dot co dot uk.

For the past few weeks, I've been thinking about a talk I had to give last Thursday to the London Beers and Innovation meetup.

The topic of the meetup was "RSS frontiers" and I had been invited as a speaker in my capacity the developer of Deeptag, the collaboration tool I'm developing that is architected around RSS.

I've been wondering for a long time what tack to take with the talk, I've explained Deeptag many times before and the reception has varied from extreme enthusiasm to extreme confusion and most states in between.

Since I was only due to talk for 10 minutes I figured the best approach would be to talk about the problems that I engineered Deeptag to solve - its benefits.

A ten minute talk on web services and XML protocols is probably not the best tack for a general audience so I figured to go with the general approach. There may be a lot of questions but far better to generate questions than stupor.

A video of the talk

Incredibly, in this modern age of video-sharing, there is actually a the entire talk is posted over at blip.tv. No need even to go that far though as thanks to blip and far more importantly, thanks to Ian Forrester who was kind enough to shoot and post the video, you can view it here and below.

The talk is chaired by Michael Nutly of New Media Age and also on the panel were Richard Edwards who spoke extremely well on his and Rob's product, ZebTab and Ivan Pope of Snipperoo who was hugely entertaining. I'm the second speaker in and in the pink shirt.

One of the things that frustrates me about blogging is that I seldom feel that I can actually do so.

I have always approached this blog as being less of a blog and more of a column, a place where I write articles on things that interest me each of which I invest a lot of time into creating.

I'm very happy to do that but in a lot of ways, it's very limiting. There are often smaller pieces of news or comment that I'd like to post here but don't for fear of diluting what I perceive to be the essence of the blog or alienating my readership.

Impatient consumer

Ironically, not only does it mean I produce longer posts but I'm also very aware that it makes the posts I do write less accessible. I love how easy it is to consume information via RSS and onscreen but when people write things that take longer than a minute to read, it also frustrates me.

There are some blogs like Paul Graham, Joel and even Ryan's Barenakedapp that I'd prefer to take longer over and read on the tube or over breakfast but I don't have my computer with me then and FeedDemon doesn't have an easy way to print.

Not wanting to rush their articles means I often don't read them at all and both Paul and Joel's last 10 posts lie unread in FeedDemon despite the fact that I'd much rather read them than much of the noise I've read elsewhere.

The deafening noise of RSS

My frustration with the single-threading of RSS as a publisher is the flip side of my frustration with my frustrations with RSS-overflow as a consumer.

One of the format's main drawbacks is its daunting signal to noise ratio. It's incredibly easy to receive news from 100 sources a day but not so easy to filter out the content you actually want, it's drinking from a firehose.

Some efforts have been made to solve this problem using smart filtering techniques but to my mind, a large part of the problem would simply go away if producers were given the tools to pre-filter and channel their content.

Our newspapers are divided into News, Politics, Sport, Lifestyle, Television etc. I don't have to read every article about the World Cup before I can find out what's on TV tonight, I just flip to the TV page.

Why not then build multi-threading into RSS?

Producer prefiltering

I would much rather produce one Webkitchen feed that contains only 'articles' and another where I post other frothier content like videos, links and news.

In today's RSS architecture though, the overhead of bundling both feeds together into one website and communicating the mutual relationship to my audience means it's currently not worth the effort.

Threading content is essentially what Mike Arrington has done with TechCrunch, CrunchGear, TechCrunchUK, CrunchNotes etc but he's got a considerably stronger brand than I have and even then I'll bet many of his subscribers don't know the other sites even exist.

I know that there are workarounds to this - I could tag articles and create an RSS feed around specific tags but that's not a solution, it's a workaround and it's one that will simply be lost on most consumers.

Threading and Deeptag

This ability to thread or channel content is an essential part of the nature of Deeptag. Deeptag uses a hybrid of RSS and OPML to allow content creators to thread their content and present it in such a way that the threads are all immediately available and obvious to the consumer.

Doing this allows content creators to pre-filter the tidal wave of material that flows into RSS aggregators in such a way that it's easier for consumers to get only what they're looking for.

Deeptag unfortunately isn't available just yet and until it is, I'm going to have to find a different solution.

For me, that solution is going to be simply to change what I write and to produce shorter posts that are perhaps less considered. I don't want to dilute the quality of what I produce but then what's the point in a high quality article that never gets written?

What are your thoughts, how do you approach your blog and what do you like to read in others?