We had the monthly CTO Breakfast this morning--perhaps for the last time in it's usually place. There was a good group present and some fun discussion.

Bruce Fryer's brought up an ironic encounter with a word-of-mouth marketing company. The person who runs the marketing for a prominent WOM company somehow didn't get Linked-In and who social networks work. Funny.

We got into a discussion of new media. I brought up the Bear Sterns report I blogged about the other day and it's breakdown of the media pipeline. There's a great opportunity in the "content packaging" space--although I wonder if advertising is the only viable model for supporting packagers.

One of the big problems, as pointed out in the report was that infinite choice equates to overwhelming confusion for end users. This point was made about the Web 2.0 conference on a recent Gillmor Gang: there were so many companies vying for attention. Many of them will never get it. In this world, the content packagers are conferences like Web 2.0, TechCrunch, Engadget, and so on.

Ben Galbraith, who knows something about AJAX, brought up Tibco GI. I'd never heard of it. GI is a set of libraries and tools for creating AJAX clients.

As usual, we spent some time discussing virtualization. The topic was brought up when I moaned about the work involved in upgrading my production server. Scott Lemon asked why I didn't just virtualize it. Interesting question. I think I'll try rsync first.

We also discussed old computers and got into a fun discussion of paper tape readers and 4k BASIC. The good old days.

The rhythm of these breakfasts is always interesting to me. The final 30 minutes or so, is always a smaller group and the topics tend to come faster and faster as things wind down. Some of my most favorite discussions are reliably in the last part of the discussion.