In his article Web 2.0: It’s a great time to be an investor, Clarence Wooten talks about the ease with which one can start a company in today’s web economy.

What’s different about today’s Web is that new technologies and behaviors that have popularized the blogging phenomenon, are also transforming the Web from a medium where information is simply published and remains static, into a platform where applications reside and services are distributed.

Indeed, web-based applications are sprouting like weeds everywhere on the Web, and in a few years you will be able to find an application for practically anything that you want to accomplish. If one is not available, it might be a simple matter of binding a few applications together to complete the type of task that you need to do.

I use these services to create RSS feeds from tags so that new postings are delivered daily to my news aggregator . I now categorize the most relevant information into new RSS feeds of blogs that I then subscribe to. In some cases, I use a collection of these feeds to create TagClouds that generate automatic folksonomies that allow me to analyze the popularity of related information (tags) over time. Does this make me a geek?

Today, that does make you a geek. In about a year, maybe two, you will be mainstream with this idea. Allow everyone reading feeds on the ‘net to help you point yourself to the information that is relevant/important to you. You don’t have to trust people implicitly, just trust that people as a group will be drawn to the same information on a topic by topic basis.

…cheaper hardware, free software infrastructure and search engine marketing have made it less expensive to start a company. Additionally, I’d add that Web 2.0 has changed the rules for entrepreneurship by lowering barriers to entry enabling bootstrapped startups to gain visibility not through advertising, but primarily through social networks and blog fueled promotion. These changes are impacting venture investing as well – consumer applications are now back in vogue…

Word of mouth advertising in the web age? Say it isn’t so! I have to thank everyone out there that has made an impact to the success of FeedLounge by blogging about it, begging to use it (who ever heard of an RSS hunger strike?), even offering to help with the development. Having talked to some people over the past week, they tend to not see the consumer en-vogue theme. I can only hope that everyone eventually sees that both spaces, consumer and enterprise, are valid spaces, given a sane approach to either.

Not to repeat everyone else in this space, but yes Virginia, now is a great time to be a startup type in this old-is-new web world. Clarence, since blogs are the new watercooler, would you like to take FeedLounge for a spin? We are here, now, helping to change the landscape of what is Web 2.0.

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