What are the implications of the recent rash of acquisitions of Web 2.0 communities? It’s hard to ignore how it feels within the industry – it makes us lightheaded, bubbly, delighted that our stock may actually be worth something again and that we “social mediasters” are taken seriously as analysts, experts, employees and advisors. Entrepreneurial bankers and management consultants are quitting their day jobs again. The open bar cocktail parties are back. It’s easy to raise money. It’s easy to find gigs. It’s tough to find developers. We’re thrilled! We’re Bullish! Buy!

But think a little harder, dig a little deeper, and we uncover mixed feelings and second thoughts.

The budget-conscious are looking at some start-up choices and acquisition prices and scratching our heads (Nice-Ventures.com). This is fine, say the optimists (See Lou Paglia). This can’t bode well, say the pessimists. We keep track of which start-ups join the deadpool (See Duncan Reilly) We secretly pull our money out of tech stocks and put it into real estate (See Michael Arrington?).

The privacy advocates among us (like Todd Cochrane at GeekNewsCentral.com) are concerned that information we gave about ourselves to Feedburner is now owned by Google (see Staci Kramer at PaidContent.org), and can be associated with the other information Google has about us and those who trust us. How will all this personally identifiable information be used to make money off our backs, for other people’s benefit?

The copyleft mavens watch as our “user-generated content” – which should in any case be owned and controlled by us, if by anyone, right? – is purchased for millions of dollars from whatever company aggregated our thoughts, voices, videos and photos (See Howard Rheingold on the Annenberg blog). Again, the dollars somehow bypass us, the content creators.

The Network Neutrality gang trembles as we consider the implications of distilling all the crazy quilt of creativity on the web into a few powerful players. How long before Google buys Ebay and Microsoft buys Yahoo? Do we really need more than two or three web brands, anyhow? How long before the “series of tubes” is controlled by a couple big players, and the rest of us must access and publish on their terms?

The pragmatists (Stephen Downes) think Big Money won’t let us have our socialist fun.

The Anti-trusters have been strangely silent – perhaps the DoubleClick deal will bring them out of the woodwork? But not if Google can help it…

Should we let our guard down and enjoy it, since it’s such a relief that the boom is back? (See David Eun’s justification on Google’s behalf from last fall) How vigilant do we need to be? Comments?