With everything that is happening with the economy, one naturally wonders about their own situation and how (if) they will be personally affected. We seem to be ok for the moment (famous last words?). Company I work for just got a big round of funding last quarter and sells a low-cost phone system that can be easily marketed as a "recession-buster".

But the scabs on the sores of us getting caught in the last downturn still feel fresh. We had a REALLY hard time recovering from that last one for a variety of reasons. In fact, it wasn't until LAST year that we finally paid off enough debt to really feel like we had fully recovered and were finally getting ahead.

Plus, TechCrunch's publishing of their Layoff Tracker brings back eerie memories of obsessively watching FuckedCompany.com's site, as if somehow reading about others layoff misery would comfort my own troubles.

Of course, out of the ashes of the last downturn came a whole new paradigm for the web; web standards, better usability, ajax, social networking, blogging, and on and on. Seems like we are at a crux now to see some new technologies/paradigms/buzzwords to take over in the next couple of years. I have absolutely no idea or insights into what the will be, but I'll be watching.