Talk to some entrepreneurs, and second only to concerns about Wall Street and the credit crunch is the growing fear that the Web 2.0 bubble is about to burst. We say: chill out. While there's more than a little legitimacy to the idea that VC firms can't continue to fund start-ups that, while cool, can't make any money, that house of cards isn't coming down today. That's because VCs are still pumping cash into Web 2.0 start-ups like crazy.

Just today LinkedIn, the social networking site for the business set, scored an additional $27.7 million dollars in funding. And yesterday "visual search site" Like.com nailed $32 million, while Howcast secured $2 million in investment. Let's not forget Mail.com either, who announced that they recently pulled $35 million in funding. Virtual worlds have also been hot in the past few weeks, as GigaOm has reported. It's estimated that these start-ups received more than $148.5 million in funding in the last quarter alone. While that's down slightly from the previous two quarters, they've still raked in nearly a half billion dollars this year alone. And just yesterday, Metaplace, another new virtual world, scored $6.7 million in second round funding. Our feeling is that if VCs are still throwing money at online worlds whose sole raison d'etre is for avatars to hook up, then things can't be that bad.

While you could argue that spate of recent layoffs is a bad sign, we don't think it is. Remember, VC firms have told their portfolio companies to tighten their belts and to cut costs. It's not that situation is so dire right now that entrepreneurs must slash staff. They're doing it in anticipation of what may come down the pike. And we take that as a sign that entrepreneurs and VCs learned something from the dot com implosion. For instance, Iggy Fanlo, CEO of start-up Adbrite tells the Financial Times said that he made cuts "ahead of any big deterioration in business conditions." He learned his lesson as the CEO of Shopping.com, which struggled during the dot come bust.

What do you think? Do we have it all wrong? Is downturn 2.0 coming?