That's exactly how I feel. If I don't make an actual effort to be social, I'll spend every second I get "working". I love it so much it doesn't feel like work and that's the real blessing.
I think it all depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Large scale projects are not well suited to outsourcing in my opinion. There's too many unskilled providers, but my biggest hurdle has been the language barrier. Even when people "speak English", there's a lot of miscommunication based off a few words they don't know, interpret differently or even differences in local customs!
For smaller projects (e.g. developing a website for a local business), outsourcing can be very profitable once you find the right provider. I've had a reasonable amount of success finding good providers in the past and they can cut development times on easier projects if you communicate clearly and provide wireframes / spec sheets. Most recently, I hired a PHP developer from Singapore who was asking for $5/hour and after I saw what he could do (with other languages as well), I immediately raised his rate to $10/hour without him requesting it. Now I've got a long term, loyal developer that works at an extremely affordable price to me and provides quality work. Is it the same quality as a $100+/hour developer in the US? Probably not, but it's very good and I'm happy to always put some finishing touches and modification in myself. I still save tons of time on smaller projects that way.
So to answer your question, yes and no. It depends what you're trying to accomplish and the exact providers you're going to work with.
SEM Rush (http://semrush.com) is a great tool that we use. There's plenty of tools that track your own input keywords, but SEM Rush for it's ability to discover keywords you didn't know you were ranking for. Free version is pretty decent to get started.
Yes! They are very much played out. As far as the "fashion" of web design, gloss and web 2.0 is fading.
Alternatively, there's always people in design who make old things work and make them new. It's technically possible to work that type of badge into a site and make it look nice! Yes, really... But I wouldn't recommend it.
As for what will replace them, that's more complicated. There's many different design styles in use each day and the world is always changing. I think the topic is most irrelevant. I don't recommend using them, but no need to go figuring out the best fit for a replacement.
RSS: http://blog.theminimgroup.com/feed