Economic Metrics

There are all sorts of ways to measure the performance of the economy, including unemployment statistics, individual stocks or the Dow Jones average. John Gruber at Daring Fireball pointed to an interesting site - It Died, which bills itself as:

"A compendium of what services and companies are no longer available for our Internet pleasure and use."

So it occurred to me that rather than using our traditional measures of economic health, we could just follow It Died and similar site Timely Demise -

"Tracking the changing retail landscape in today's economic environment."

Aren't the closing of retail shops and the shuttering of Internet startups and services a better indicator of how the economy is doing than what the NASDAQ closed at today?

BTW - the market is up today:)