Good blog post by John Palizza with personal perspective on how the economy is impacting IR based on observations from #NIRI08 conference. To him, it felt like attendance was down, but he also observes that vendors were less extravagant this year with their free trinkets than last. Vendors also reported less interest. However, a commenter identified only as "Pops" says attendance was actually up this year over last, but agrees that vendors were giving away less. And in his own blog post Pops pegs the attendance figure at 1,700 people. His post is here: http://is.gd/wls - Dominic Jones