I think Y Combinator didn't receive as much publicity this year as they did earlier (Jessica's book certainly helped, though). Judging from the number of users on news.yc, I am guessing that there are less than 500 applicants. Which to me is quite a low number considering the opportunity!
Yeah definitely. I assumed since Techcrunch gave a lot of publicity to YComb that would help in a big way. I read somewhere that in 2005 the applicants were around 250 or so.