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The dust is still settling after Google, a company that didn't exist nine years ago, spent $1.6-billion (U.S.) to buy YouTube, a company that didn't exist three years ago. I'm not a numbers guy, and yet even the casual observer can't help but notice that 1.6 billion is, in fact, a very large number, especially for a company that's been around for a very small number of years. It's impossible not to ask: If money is being sloshed about so indiscriminately, how can I go about having some sloshed my way?

Indeed, the YouTube deal has people chattering about whether we're entering a second great Internet bubble. Hopes are high that anyone with a half-baked idea can score some venture capital, entice a couple of million bored surfers to log in, become the flavour of the month, and hope that some media conglomerate suffering a bout of new-media insecurity will come knocking before the whole thing collapses.

It's all a matter of picking the right approach. For instance, the first Web bubble, the one that spoiled the turn of the century for so many, saw a parade of sites that picked real-world tasks and then charged people for a less convenient, more awkward way of performing them on-line. Instead of taking your pants to the dry cleaners, wouldn't it be great if, say, for a monthly subscription fee of $40, you could use http://www.drycleanme.com to schedule a visit from a delivery guy to pick up your soiled pants?

It didn't really work out. A great many people lost their shirts (and possibly their pants) in the process. That's why any hopeful Web start-up first needs to establish its credentials as part of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon.

Broadly speaking, the term refers to sites that fill their pages with user-submitted content, like blogs or photos or comments, and play up the Web's social-networking potential. Enthusiasts heralded Web 2.0 as a breakthrough in digital democracy, letting everyday users create media content. It also happened to be a heck of a lot cheaper to let users generate content (or, frequently, steal it) than to pay people to write the stuff.

Web 2.0 sites have gained a degree of legitimacy, thanks especially to a few high-profile success stories, like the formerly Canadian photo-sharing site Flickr.com, which Yahoo bought last year. And in their success, they've spawned an entirely entertaining cult of conformity, with cookie-cutter start-ups emerging weekly, laden with funny names and purposes that are all more of the same. Yet they keep popping up, and they keep getting funded. This, my friends, is where the money is -- if you toe the line.

Let's step through it. To start with, if you want to be a respectable Web start-up in 2006, you need a silly name. The fact that all of the non-silly website names have already been taken leaves on-line entrepreneurs with two options: Either they can take a real word and mangle it (Flickr was a pioneer here), or they can invent words that have nothing whatsoever to do with their service.

Just looking at the front page of TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com; note the silly name), an enthusiastic blog that's become the who's who of Web start-ups, I see ads for on-line services called "Yoono," ("Instant suggestions while surfing"), "Edgio," ("Classified listings from the edge"), "LogoJeez" ("Logo design experts"). Elsewhere on the site: "Podzinger," "TagLoops," "Zoho," "Lala," "Guba." Gah?

Next, you will need a garage and a couple of guys. Failing that, you will need to engineer a compelling creation myth to sell when the media comes calling. You will need a goofy visual design with bright colours and big, lower-case letters. As for what your site actually does, that takes second rank to ensuring that it has trendy features that may or may not be of any value to actual users.

To illustrate, let's update our original example for 2006. Our site will be called "dryclynr.com." Users will upload profiles of themselves wearing crumpled suits and swap little messages. They will rate dry-cleaning services on a scale of one to five coat hangers; a Google map will locate them. They will buy and sell dry-cleaning tokens and write dry-cleaning journals. They will suggest cool dry-cleaning links and share dry-cleaning videos, and, if they buy the gold membership, attempt to date each other. There will not actually be any dry cleaning involved.

Finally, you need to declare your service as being "in Beta." Originally, "Beta" was a term that programmers used to label unfinished software that was unreliable and unready for public consumption. Web 2.0 sites, however, exist in a state of perpetual beta, which usually means, "the site is working, but we have no idea how we're going to make money on this." And fair enough, making money isn't the point. The point is to stay focused, get big and sell out. Heeere, Google Google Google.

webseven@globeandmail.com