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It may be dismal economic times, but some companies are continuing to make new hires in tech and new media. That's what we track on our Jobwire site and below you'll find aggregate hiring numbers for the first 6 weeks of the new year.

We last covered aggregate stats in the middle of December and the new numbers are similar to what we saw then. IT and software companies are hiring more than anyone else, but marketing firms are now hiring more than publishing and social media companies, a switch since our last report.

When your company owns the biggest open source code repository online, the most venerable geek news aggregator there is and many geeks' favorite place to shop for wacky stuff - what do you do next? Hopefully we're about to find out, because the owners of SourceForge, SlashDot and ThinkGeek are apparently working on a new project.

One of the most interesting ways to get an idea where companies of interest are headed is by watching who they hire. That's one of the reasons why we launched Jobwire, our site tracking who gets hired in tech and new media. SourceForge, also the name of SourceForge and Slashdot's parent company, has made a couple of interesting hires lately.

Hires of software developers and web designers slowed last week, while tech and new media company hires for Director level positions increased substantially over the six weeks prior. Developers and designers still remained among the season's most in-demand people in tech while marketing and IT firms saw big increases in hires. A whole lot of surprising hires we've been seeing in the publishing world (new and old) finally slowed down this week.

We've tracked these and other interesting stats and stories about people still getting jobs at a time of economic downturn. Check out our chart-laden full coverage of this season's new hires in tech and new media over at our hiring news site Jobwire.

The Internet has made our personal lives public. Thanks to social networks, the kind of public scrutiny that was once reserved for the very famous, is now possible for many of us. As we wrote last month, social networking sites like Facebook have become your "permanent record" on the Internet, and that privacy on the web is just an illusion. But do employees even have a legitimate reason for looking at your social networking profiles and other information on the web when hiring you? Is that fair?