Greg Reinacker has announced that he's advertising NewsGator on some of Infoworld's RSS feeds. There's already been some negative reaction. The question's academic for me, since I don't subscribe to any InfoWorld feeds, or any feeds from a commercial source for that matter, but I expect that this idea will catch on, sooner or later. And considering the number of weblogs I see out there with donation buttons, I doubt that it'll be restricted to commercial RSS feeds.

On the other hand, I don't know that what InfoWorld is doing is all that obnoxious, except that it's overt advertising. There's definitely a few webloggers who act like the unpaid marketing department for various commercial interests. Now if someone were to repeatedly plug a product and accept money for that, not revealing that they were being paid; that would be obnoxious.

One possible problem I see with Infoworld's advertising is that they plan to run the ad at the top of the RSS feed for a week. Assuming that an aggregator would see it as a new item each day, I'd get a little tired of that. How about ad text at the top of each new item, so a (human) reader would see that first?

I've been hearing a lot lately about offshore consulting, partly because my employer has jumped on the bandwagon, but there's others talking too.  Of course, there's Dave Thomas' How to Keep Your Job, which he recapped at the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in Denver.  I've also received a couple emails on local outsourcing seminars, presumably offered by outfits hoping to sell outsourcing contracts.  Today James Robertson linked to Ron Hitchens, who offers Agile practices as a way to counter the flow of work out of the US.  This is interesting, because one statistic I often see touted in connection with offshore software development is that most CMM level 5 organizations are located outside of the US.  CMM isn't necessarily antithetical to Agile processes, but a CMM level 5 certification definitely implies a heavy process.  I recall that the CMM (or specifically, the lack of compliance in the US) was one of Ed Yourdon's big concerns in Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, which was a scary book in 1993, coming at the end of a pretty bad recession (though Yourdon issued a gigantic mea culpa 4 years later).  I think it's pretty interesting that CMM is becoming a big thing again 10 years later.