People in the technology business tend to consider themselves apart from the economy as a whole, because the innovation cycles of tech have historically been powerful enough to overcome the boom-and-bust cycles of the broader business world. If your plan calls for 50 per cent annual revenue growth, and a recession comes along and cuts that down to 20 per cent, well, there are worse fates.

Still, it's hard for anyone whose job involves making payroll, especially in the US, not to be at least a little nervous about the state of the economy. Credit crunch? Those are always alarming words. The ongoing collapse of the dollar? Alarming as well, though its impact is hard to interpret. While it may be true, in theory, that for smart, strong companies a downturn is an opportunity to invest and gain market share, the reality is that most firms are inclined to hunker down and cut spending.

So far though, the pace of investment and deal-making in the internet economy doesn't appear to be slowing markedly. Just this week, the three-year-old social networking site Bebo was sold to AOL for a cool $800 million (yielding an immense return for both the founders and the venture capitalists). New financings continue apace: a quick scan of PaidContent.org, my favorite source for this sort of info, shows no fewer than 22 venture capital funding announcements for Web 2.0-related businesses from last week alone, with close to $200 million invested. Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

Indeed, this kind of activity seems to confirm the traditional theory of tech running on its own cycle. VC investments in the web sector are being made on the premise that we are at a fundamental tipping point in the way that media is produced and consumed, and if you have a great idea and can build a good position in the new order of things, you'll be profiting from that for decades to come. What consumer spending or the property market might do this year or next or even the year after that is pretty much irrelevant.

In my own business, I'm also seeing some evidence of the proposition that internet advertising spending will be much less affected than other forms of ad spending in this downturn. A lot of money is moving from old media to new media, and even if the overall amount of money being spent is flat or in decline, the amount spent online will keep growing. Our online ad sales in the first few months of this year have been quite strong, despite the dire headlines.

At the same time, we’re starting to hear from some of our clients that their marketing budgets are frozen, or even shrinking a little bit. If we needed to borrow money, well, that would already be quite a bit harder than it would have been six months ago.

And when we look around as journalists, it’s easy enough to see the impact of the global financial turmoil. Tamarack Resort, which opened just a few years ago in nearby Idaho as the first big new ski resort in the US in decades, is now trying to fight off foreclosure by its lender Credit Suisse; the market for $100 million construction loans for resort real estate projects has apparently seized up. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of this kind of problem.

For small companies like my own, New West, there are not a whole lot of ways to hedge against macroeconomic forces, even if we wanted to. Personally, I try to balance the optimism that’s necessary to any entrepreneurial venture – and the real evidence that businesses based on online advertising will avoid the worst – with a realistic view of the risks, and the assumption that a recession will probably hurt a little, at least at the margin.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't really help us to be too focused on these issues. As a business journalist by trade, I can't help but get caught up in the ghoulish stories of foolish or over-extended firms going down. As a business owner, though, it's still all about one foot in front of the other.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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