One week and six days ago (thanks Time Since), I (along with everybody else) wrote about NetVibes and Web 2.0. At the end of the post, I said, “Hopefully, Wall Street won’t screw things up this time by being insane.”

Lord knows why, but it seems like those silly folks who think about money didn’t listen to my advice.

Mike Rundle, over at BusinessLogs, wrote in his article, Flock and Web 2.0: The Leaning Tower of Buzz, about the monetary outloook at Web 2.0, and why he’s a scared of another dot.bomb:

Dozens of “Web 2.0″ companies launched this past week, while many other companies (Upcoming, Weblogs, Inc., Weblogs.com) were bought. It seems like the web industry economy has suddenly gained 50lbs of muscle weight overnight, and sudden upturns are always scary because it reminds me of the old days of over-valuation, junk IPOs, idiotic businesses, and everything else that sucked after the dotcom economy drowned. Are we growing too fast too quickly?

Kevin Burton, one of the original RSS guys, has the same fear:

A lot of the recent news around Web 2.0 is starting to frighten me. There is just too much money flying around with too much hype and too little value. Take the Web 2.0 conference for example. This thing was way over hyped. It was fun and all but worth $2800? I don’t think so. Mostly suits from my vantage point.

Over in the USA Today Money section, Kevin Maney writes from a cynically funny perspective about last week’s Web 2.0 conference:

People who had been taking cover in bunkers for five years showed up. Hey, there’s Joe Kraus! He co-founded Internet search company Excite — since defunct — in the 1990s and is back with a new company called JotSpot. Hey, there’s onetime analyst Henry Blodgett! He was banned from Wall Street for hyping Web stocks and now writes a blog.

Everyone half-expected the Pets.com sock puppet to wander through, checking e-mail on its BlackBerry.

And he warns:

In Web 2.0 land, the only “exit strategy” for most entrepreneurs seems to be to get bought by eBay or Yahoo. It’s either that or — ew! — actually spend a decade building a viable company.

But amidst all the naysaying, Richard MacManus over at Read/Write Web, still has cautious optimism:

OK so there’s a lot of hype. So the VCs are throwing money around. So get to work. Build something Web-based that mainstream people will need and want. Now’s the time to do it.

Of course, all of this is regarding the business opportunities of Web 2.0. Nick Carr is more worried about the moral implications:

Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can’t imagine anything more frightening…Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It’s a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn’t care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn’t care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn’t care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I don’t have much to add on any of this. I just wanted to balance my perspective on Web 2.0 and wanted to share that balancing act with you.