Good news for small business owners in Britain and Europe. The new Czech presidency is preparing to tear up the notorious red tape mountain of the EU.

Under new plans, small firms would be required to file only one set of reports and accounts, rather than having to submit information to several government agencies.

SMEs would also be able to conduct business operations across borders without having to register subsidiaries in those countries.

Small firms would also be given new rights to ensure their bills are paid on time.

It seems the Czechs are a shot in the arm for European small businesses.

In these dark economic times, if you have lost your job it may be worthwhile to think counter-intuitively.

Make your own work. Paul Graham makes a great case for it.

“Our bodies weren’t designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically.”

“The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups. … Though they’re statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be working in a way that’s more natural for humans.”

As an inveterate freelance worker most of my life, I totally agree with Graham’s analysis. In between I’ve worked for a mega-corp, BT (British Telecom), and for Government, the UK’s Central Office of Information. In each case I was a whale out of water.

It’s only when I started businesses around my personal template, or became a freelance writer breathing the air of freedom, that I came fully into my own. Most people are probably like this.

Paul Graham — who is a venture capitalist — is right. You can buck the system, and you owe it to yourself to make the attempt.

Incidentally, a recession is a great time to go it alone. Venture capitalists have money burning a hole in their vaults, there’s a surfeit of experts going cheap, and opportunities for anyone with a great idea or a new approach.

Innovation is at a premium during a downturn. Many of the biggest names in corporate America began in a garage during a recession when there was little else to do.

Related Stories
The world needs Up-To-A-Pointism
Globalization destroys necessary bulkheads
The Kraken Wakes
Depression looms like a yawning abyss

Databases have always been clunky bits of software. Often, they don’t find what you are looking for. At other times they produce the wrong result.

They are also leaky and easy to hack. Perhaps their worst feature, though, is that they are expensive to purchase and even more so to develop to a business’s needs.

Hope is at hand, however. It seems databases on hard drives are on the way out, to be replaced by “cloud computing.”

Read John Evans’s article, The Great Database Crisis 2008, over at Syntagma. Here’s an excerpt:

So how is it that a Google search produces millions of results in a fraction of a second? We know they have all of the internet on millions of computers in various datacentres around the world. Could it possibly be done with a massive distributed database threaded over countless Dell boxes?

The answer, obviously, is no. But the surprising fact is that they hold the entire internet in RAM memory. That’s what makes the process so lightning fast.

A version of this article by John Evans first appeared in Syntagma.

Many small businesses are web-based now. Some use weblog technology as the centrepiece of the enterprise.

However, the outlook is not sunny for these businesses during this recessionary interlude. What, then, does the future hold for small-to-medium internet business?

Another week, another blog network wraps itself up. This time it’s the business network, Know More Media, which was particularly hard hit by Google’s ranking penalties.

Like BlogNation, a UK-based outfit, they simply ran out of money. I can think of many others that suffered the same fate, but will spare you the litany.

Even the few networks that professionalized themselves by raising VC funding and bringing in experienced managers, are finding the going tough right now. Earlier predictions of another dotcom bust are not off the table yet.

I’ve written many pieces here over the past three years on the choices faced by network owners and the chances of success. Most warned of this present crisis. As a result, Syntagma was ahead of the pack in diversifying into specialist information products on subscription terms. We have not yet felt the full force of the U.S. recession-in-progress.

The coming steep downturn in the UK will have minimum effect on us, except if the pound sterling falls relative to the dollar, in which case we will see our income rise on a windfall.

In America, the startup industry is losing momentum fast, although there’s no shortage of brave souls willing to chance more than their arms.

So, what’s to be done if you have invested heavily in an internet business, whether content or blogging-based or not?

The answer is to spot the second bounce of the ball.

As the economies eventually begin to turn around and a slow recovery takes place, most people will be looking out for “little green shoots” to signify a return to economic growth. In the early 1990s those shoots were a long time coming, and when they did, they grew slowly like hardwood trees, not the swift pines we were hoping for. I suspect the little shoots will keep us waiting even longer this time.

Green shoots may be interesting, but watching for the second bounce of the ball is usually more profitable. If the first bounce online for many of us was mass publishing technologies, what could the second be?

Providing content on your own platform as both writer and publisher makes sense because it cuts costs. Hiring other writers to do it for you made sense three years ago, but with advertisers shunning small-to-medium operations it’s probably easier to flip burgers.

Now we need a second bounce to reflate the whole business of working successfully online.

Forget social media. Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion Of Attention And The Coming Dark Age highlights the price we pay — including actual brain damage — for standard multi-tasking and trying to keep abreast of the information space.

As in my own book on the subject, Mediate Yourself, this is now becoming a common theme whose time is about to come. Finding ways not just of sifting and processing information but relating it to people’s essential requirements is a major path forward. Limiting individuals’ needs to interact with screens is probably more relevant still.

Simplifying the lives of knowledge workers is the big leap forward that will take us to the next level.

So far technology and software have complicated human life immeasurably. The constant pressure to upgrade and learn new tricks is mind-mashingly painful for most people — hence the brain damage.

The truth is, there may be no single second bounce this time, but a series of mini-bounces, with no one golden goose presenting itself for carving.

At Syntagma, we have our eyes on a variety of possibilities. To use a rugby term, all it needs is for someone to pick up a ball and run with it. As I write, there are not many runners out there.