Lots of interesting Web 2.0 stuff doing the rounds today. John Battelle, author and co-founder of the Web 2.0 Conference, has a useful piece in the New York Times hammering home the obvious point that Web 2.0 is not a bubble. Steady bull market maybe, but not something that’s easily burstable.

Web 1.0 was an expensive place to build a business. Technology was primitive and expensive. Bandwidth costly ~ few users had broadband in those days. A professional e-commerce, Web-based business cost millions to set up. This was reflected in the rush to the stock markets to raise private funding.

Web 2.0, by contrast, is largely built on open-source software, often free, and uses other free services, like search, to leverage the power of the Internet. Battelle makes the point that you can lease a hosting platform that will handle high traffic in the millions per day for less than $500 a month.

Today, the lack of public offerings suggests that startups are finding comfortable means of funding their businesses from the private domain : credit cards, personal savings, friends or family, and maybe just a little venture capital to make the whole thing look viable. The pattern is then to sell up to a mainstream media outfit : think WeblogsInc to AOL, Flickr to Yahoo, MySpace to News Corp.

There never has been a better time to start a business, and especially a virtual one.

Ryan Sholin has also got an interesting post on his journalism blog on how journos (content providers) fare in today’s world of personal media. The piece was triggered by a visit from Robert Scoble, who demonstrated on his laptop how Web 2.0 would shape up and why journalists should get involved. Here are Sholin’s conclusions :

* Context-based advertising is a real live source of revenue. Google, and others to a lesser extent, are dead serious about making money for advertisers and publishers. The many little pieces of technology Google has been dropping on the Web lately all fit into this model.

* Journalism students don’t necessarily need to know how to write code; they need to know how to cut and paste the right code into the right place within content managment systems.

* What J-School students should know, however, is where to find and gather the “right code.” We’re talking about RSS feeds, tagging tools, comment systems, ways to embed video on Web pages. I know where to find this stuff, but chances are most students here are using it without knowing what it is or that they’re using it at all.

* Flash + Journalists = Good.

It looks like the future is coming at us fast. Seems to me that “adaptability” is what universities should be teaching before the technical side. Why? Because the Web itself is the best university in the world. Learn to use it, search especially, and nothing else can match it for scale and depth. I reckon that five years on the Internet should get you a masters degree in communications craftsmanship.