Clearing the desk

Some things that I have on my desk to share with you today...

• Video site Metacafe looks cool... as does this Blinkx search for Alfa Romeo vids.
  
• My tumblr site is aggregating feeds from twitter and my blogs. That's cool.
  
• Jaiku does much the same but differently.
• Wharton updates us all on Russia's growing wealth (via PetroDollars, of course). Watch out for the Russian bear, it may become an economic powerhouse afterall.
• Network World reports on 'non-solicitation' clauses in IBM outsourcing contracts (doesn't mention it works both ways, by the way. OK, I work for IBM and these are my views only, not necessarily the company's, and I'm not a legal eagle either. Setting aside the thought that it should be upfront (and maybe it is?) if you are an outsourcer and have spent money and trained up staff to provide services to a client, how fair is it that the client, perhaps secretly intending to insource or just wanting to save on training and recruitment costs, offers that particular worker a job? On one hand sure, why not, it's a free country. On the other it's like free recruitment - you get to trial workers for free and virtually get a guaranteed star. At the very least should they reimburse for the training costs.? Maybe. Or impose some other restriction, which is just another way of adding "cost" to what would otherwise be a frictionless transfer of "star performers" from the outsourcer to the client. Hmmm.
• More on IBM... InfoWorld reports on IBM's embrace of MySQL (a competitor of their own DB2).
• And don't forget GeoMonkey for Google Maps with a difference.