Best of the blogs: Zack Urlocker spent 15 minutes with Kindle, Amazon’s new portable e-book reader. The display, he writes, is fantastic. “To me, it’s as easy to read as a book.” Hands-on: Amazon Kindle. What’s more, it’s “not nearly so ugly in person as it appears in photos.” That said, though, “if you’ve already got a cell phone, a Blackberry, an iPod and a laptop, then adding one more device seems like overkill,” Urlocker writes. “But if the Kindle could be a general purpose browser and email device, that would be a different story.”Tech’s bottom line: Surveys by three firms demonstrate that the credit crunch and potential for a recession have IT execs on the alert about spending next year, with the software sector taking the biggest hit. One of those firms, JMP, has been conducting the survey for seven years, and according to analyst Patrick Walravens, the result is the worst since 2001. “The potential rate cut is dominating the thinking of investors right now,” Bill Snyder explains in Analysts predict IT squeeze. “The market is counting on a cut of at least one-quarter of a point and that news is essentially priced into stocks at this point. A half-point cut would obviously be welcomed with a rally, while a stand-pat stance would makes things ugly in a big hurry.” Technology Industry