Last night, “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” aired a piece on “how technology companies are innovating amid the recession by designing popular new smart phone applications.”

BoomTown was to talk about how perhaps not all of the 65,000 apps being created by legions of third-party developers for the Apple iPhone will result in gold, diamonds and unicorns raining down on entrepreneurs.

Oddly enough, I somehow went all Jules Verne at the end and started talking about screens on coffee tables, so I am obviously just as bad.

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Almost two years ago, just as Web 2.0 was heating up, BoomTown did a video interview with Slide founder and CEO Max Levchin.

Soon after, the popular maker of widgets and other social networking applications grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors, which put the value of the company at $550 million.

But that was before the recession hit, as well as a generally more sober outlook for a lot of high-flying Silicon Valley darlings like Slide, which have had to wise up a little and get down to business.

So, it was time for another chat with Levchin to find out what’s what.

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Last week, an obviously jet lagged (and badly dressed, as some troglodyte commenters on Yahoo pointed out, but it was snowing!) BoomTown visited with Henry Blodget at Yahoo’s Tech Ticker studio in Times Square to talk about a range of digital topics.

The video interviews included: How well Apple will do without Steve Jobs on deck; whether blogging reporting and professionalism standards need to rise; when Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Time Warner online unit AOL will stop dancing around various deals; and, finally, how the recession is impacting Silicon Valley.

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Oh, a nice tiny surprise from Yahoo, as it reported its fourth-quarter results, which came in at 17 cents a share in adjusted earnings, compared to the 12 to 13 cents Wall Street was expecting.

“Despite the challenging economic environment, Yahoo! delivered adjusted operating cash flow above the midpoint of guidance for the fourth quarter,” said new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in the company’s official release.

But let’s experience Bartz Live and Unplugged at the fourth-quarter earnings call, including a Q&A in which–the company noted at the top of the call–former Yahoo CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang might make an unexpected cameo appearance.

(He didn’t.)

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Today, Google, the Internet’s juggernaut in both power and profits, will release its third-quarter earnings after the markets close.

Investors and Silicon Valley will be closely watching Google’s performance and also be listening carefully to the guidance its executives will be giving, hoping the Web’s most stellar performer of late does not stumble.

If it does, some think it is look-out-below time. And, if it does not, it will presumably be all sunshine and daisies for the sector.

Neither is exactly true.

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Just as there is a tendency to inanely cheerlead the tech sector valuations on the way up, there is inevitably the equally ridiculous overreaction to the downward slide going on right now for digital companies.

Thus, while by no means the weakest sector of the economy, a range of tech stocks got hammered today in the markets, getting dragged down with the market at large as investors continued to fret about a sustained worldwide recession that government bailouts could not prevent.

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To be fair, the whole market was dragged down today due to worries about a deepening recession. But Yahoo’s ever-decreasing share price has got to have the company and its investors mighty worried.

Hitting lows not seen since the dot-com doldrums of 2001 and 2002, Yahoo closed at $15.58, down $1.38 or 8.14 percent, giving the troubled Internet giant a market cap of just $22.08 billion.

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