Silicon Florist’s links arrangement for October 17

Paul Graham writes “The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded.”

West Cafe offers “Portland Twitterati are invited to spend some quality time at the West Cafe, a fine downtown Portland dining and drinking establishment. Because we’ve begun to experience such a positive response to our involvement with the Twitter community, we wanted to ‘Thank You’ by offering Twitters a special dinner deal.”

Andrew Hyde writes “$5,000,000 is being given away to fund innovative ideas that address the following points: Use or create digital, open-source technology as the code base, use news and information to serve the public interest, benefit one or more specific geographic communities, and be innovative.” Um, hello? I can’t swing a piece of bacon without hitting 20 Portland startups that qualify for this.
(The hardest of the 4. A map mashup

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes “One of the services that I provide for consulting clients is assistance in recruiting bloggers and social media experts for hire. In the past 2 months I’ve helped 3 companies find company bloggers or community managers. Right now I’m working on a list of 3 to 5 high-quality candidates for a community management position for a very innovative and cool startup.”