After moving on from Mindquarry, Sandro Groganz has decided to start up a new venture to help out the Open Source community - an Open Source Marketing Consultancy.

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

He will be offering services to help Open Source projects become more visible and profitable including creating marketing strategies, branding, positioning, public relations, collaterals and working with social media. He's also providing some of the basics behind it all in entries to the wiki on his site.

Both Vidyut Luther and Tobias Schlitt have noticed an unfortunate trend with the PHP portal site, PHPFreaks.com - the surreptitious placement of advertising links in text that was never meant to have it.

From Vidyut:
I got an email this morning from PHPfreaks.com. The email announced the availability of 5.1.2. So, I decided to click the link just to see what was new. As I was reading the article, I clicked on the word PHP. I noticed that this link took me to www.serverpowered.com. Strange I thought, so I looked at some other links. Basically, the first paragraph, and any instance of the word PHP, is automatically hyperlinked to the serverpowered.com.

And, from Tobias:
As Vidyut pointed out, phpfreaks.com seems to automatically create a link everywhere on their website, where the word "PHP" appears. They do this even in user comments. Apparently this seems to be a nice service, if the link would direct you to php.net (or maybe some explaination page or something). But instead they link to some hosting provider which supports PHP (what also well known as a "sponsored link").

They both note that having sponsorship is okay, but when it starts to interfere with the content of the site, placing links in comments/text where it wasn't wanted, there might be some issues with that...