A few weeks ago, Mahalo's Jason Calacanis (who founded Weblogs Inc. and Download Squad) issued an e-mail missive (now posted here) predicting that 80% of all web 2.0 start-ups would fail to reach the next round of funding or profitability. The man makes some good points, and the tenuous economic climate is already leading to start-up layoffs and reduced expansion. Fortunately for the web industry, there are still some silver linings. Social widget provider JS-Kit just closed a Series B funding round for $3.6M.

JS-Kit offers compact JavaScript snippets that you can add to your webpage or blog to add dynamic rating, review, poll and comment functionality. We've discussed JS-Kit before and it really is one of the easiest ways to add threaded and dynamic commenting or Digg-like rating systems to a blog or website.

In addition to closing a second round of funding, JS-Kit has also hired on Chris Saad, co-founder of the DataPortability Project as a strategic advisor. Chris is an incredibly, incredibly smart guy -- he is also responsible for APML and Particls -- and he is sure to be a huge assett to the JS-Kit team.