That said, I’d be lying if I didn’t peek at what the Dow is doing on Yahoo Finance throughout the day, even though I own very little stock! And of course I glommed onto the news that leading economic indicators rose in September, while intellectually grappling with the fact that the silver lining is likely a ways off as yet.

What to do in the meantime? I try to remain focused on the fact that I’m somewhere between delighted and ecstatic about the potential for innovation today (even in a gloomy economic climate) and the Internet’s prospects down the road. There are plenty of sources for finding good news, and lots of good news to focus on, even if it can take a little extra concentration to do so at times. Great example is Regular Geek’s Rob Diana, who aside from being a voracious Google Reader sharer on a par with Robert Scoble, checked in this weekend with a great piece called “Companies Got Funding Last Week?” which details a slew of start-ups that recently secured VC funding:

So, as you can see, all is not “doom and gloom” in the startup world. If you look around, some companies are still getting funding. Others may be cutting, but maybe they really needed to. Hopefully, we can get more balanced coverage from some other sites as well. Obviously, everything is not rosy, but sometimes you do need to highlight the good things.

All of this was on my mind when I stumbled across TechCrunch’s Layoff Tracker, a page that tracks news of layoffs and such. I’m reminded of FuckedCompany.com, a site now defunct semi-ironically, that tracked much the same and even created a post-web 1.0 dot com bomb-era community of sorts around the chaos of the imploding Internet economy circa 2000-2003.

I’ve been through layoffs, I’m afraid to say, and more than once. It’s a painful, demoralizing, and even cruel experience. In terms of my personal life saga, I’m thrilled years later that everything worked out as it did, for I would not be where I am today and all of that. But I will certainly not be reveling in layoffs and company shutdowns here.

I guess what I’m saying is that I plan on being one of the ones who will focus on the good stuff.

Lots and lots of white space, super minimalist. Now, I get wanting to strip down design to get a really clean look, and Mark Hendrickson notes that the idea was to move toward a less bloated looking and faster loading site.

I get all of that. I’m not a huge design nut myself – my focus is predominantly on content, particularly when I’m reading a blog, and overwhelmingly when I’m reading a tech blog.

Still, I can’t help being a little critical here. TechCrunch proudly sits on top of the tech blog heap, so it can handle a little criticism from the likes of me!

So… there’s way too much white space going on here. The minimal line divisions on the page are “web 2.0″-looking to the hilt (which kind of hit its peak sometime in early to mid-2007, I’d say), minimal to the point of barely being visible. The result is much less bloat, but particularly above the fold the site looks downright stark and antiseptic.

If I’m rocking the site on my blackberry, that’s perfect. But on the web, can we get just a little bit of color and design going, maybe? Even on a tech blog, I’m sure we all can handle it.