A complete list of 2007’s web/tech acquisitions has been published and it makes for encouraging reading for those of us that are working in that field. The good news is that people are definitely still spending big bucks on buying up brilliant ideas.

Two of the more well-known names in the list, Last.FM and Feedburner, were bought for a total of 280 million dollars. Even very niche sites such as Treehugger were commanding fees of $10 million.

So has global finance finally regained confidence in the internet following its overexuberance in the initial bubble that burst? I think that now that broadband connection speeds are widely used enough for most in the developed world to have constant, high-quality access to the net things are different – the ideas that people had 10 years ago are now a lot more feasible.

People are connected for longer, aren’t worried about minute-by-minute charges (as they were with dialup), have faster computers to deal with the flashier graphics and are generally more net-savvy. All this adds up to a “consumer” that’s spending more of their time online but also, and perhaps more importantly, committing more of their life onto the net. They are filling social networks with personal data, storing their diaries online and basically becoming perfect patrons of the online world. It’s like the equivalent of going to your local superstore and spending 9 hours in there, signing up for all the loyalty cards and trying all the tasters. Now obviously not everyone spends money on the internet, but the reality is that traffic is synonymous with cash for many websites. The more visitors a site has, the more its worth to potential investors.

No wonder Facebook has been valued as $15 billion. Yes. Billion.