Like many software developers, I spend some time thinking about my competitive strategy. How will I remain employable and employed in a flat-world future dominated by outsourcers? BaseLine magazine is one of my favorite IT magazines and they've published an encouraging analysis of the risks and dangers of outsourcing. Key points: The actual cost advantage of outsourcing is typically something like 20% and there are large risks including high staff turnover and poor communication.

Also in the same issue is an article about buy-vs-build which is interesting but which hashes over already standard rules of thumb, such as "Build if the system will give you an advantage over your competitors. " IE: Don't invest your resources in building commodity software even if it seems cheaper. In the long run, once support and maintenance are factored in, it won't be.

Infoworld has a related article, "how to keep your tech career afloat" which is interesting in that it spotlights unified communications as a hot area.

The New York Times ran an article a couple of days ago on a data visualization website sponsored by IBM called Many Eyes. On this web site you can use free visualization tools to examine your own datasets for not-obvious relationships. My favoriate visualizations are word trees, like this one for Sun Tzu's Art of War.