It's been a while since I last posted online because I've been busy exploring the Web 2.0 space. A recent post on another blog reminded me to try to post more often!

While in business school, it's hard to get a completely new busines started. But it's a great time to get educated about a new space, and to look for interesting new entrepreneurs to invest in.

To get started, I've been trying to understand what I originally thought of as the consumer online space from a number of different perspectives.

First, what does the ecosystem look like - who are the players (large companies and small), who are the investors, and what are they doing. More on that later.

Second, I wanted to answer some basic questions:
- How do I put advertising on a site?
- What's the difference between google adsense and other ad programs?
- How do I create new web sites?
- What if I want community sites, based on a wiki or a forum? How do I set those up?
- Most importantly, how do I drive traffic to my site or sites? Do I buy advertising? Organic search? SEO?
- How can I accept payments? How do I include affiliate links on my sites?
- Are there significant arbitrage opportunities between what it costs me to generate traffic and what I can get paid from selling that traffic to someone else?
- Can I successfully use off-shore development to get web sites and infrastructure developed? How viable are sites like Rentacoder and elance for getting work done?

I plan to go through each of these issues and more in upcoming posts.