More and more Web sites are being rewritten as Ajax applications and traditional desktop software is rapidly moving to the Web via Ajax. But, often, this transition is being made with reckless disregard for security. Ajax developers desperately need guidance on securing their applications. Billy Hoffman, co-author of Ajax Security, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the book.

Phil regularly holds a meeting that he calls the CTO Breakfast. It is an opportunity for people who work in technology to discuss current issues. In this episode, Phil holds an online version of the meeting. The group review such topics as the recently released Amazon SimpleDB, MIT's open courseware project, and how LinkedIn just open their site to developers. They also discuss the status of open source social networking and the problems of monetization. The group finishes with their predictions for early 2008.

Neil Giarratana, president of a small web software firm called Lucidus, is bucking a demographic trend. According to the United Nations, 2007 was the tipping point for world urbanization, and migration to big cities is expected to be a huge continuing trend in the 21st century. But Neil moved from Fairfax, VA to Keene, NH to combine high-tech business with small-town New England life.

In a keynote presentation from the 2007 O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, Brian Murray, Group President for HarperCollins Publishers, provides a textbook business strategy analysis of dealing with rapid change. During his presentation, Murray provides details of the 6 step process HarperCollins used to react to the dramatic changes in the publishing industry.

From the start, phones have been a point-to-point communication method: pick up the receiver, dial a number, hope for an answer. Jyri Engestrom's microblogging app, Jaiku, changes all that by interfacing your mobile phone with pervasive internet connectivity. What we get is a handset that is used increasingly less for calling and more for sharing what you're doing, where you're going, who you're with, and the photo you just took. These microposts broadcast a river of rich presence information about you: from one-on-one to many-to-many.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Stuart Smolkin's conveyor belt manufacturing company, Intralox, had no disaster plan in place. Although central operations weren't decimated, the company had to deal with the disruption of electricity, phones, and computer systems in order to organize evacuated employees into recovery teams. How did Intralox handle this challenge and get running in a mere 30 days? Smolkin offers lessons on preparedness for businesses faced with disruption.

The O'Reilly Media founder and CEO presents one of his regular Radar updates, with the focus this time squarely on open source software. The world in which open source now operates is very different from the world in which it started. O'Reilly believes that the problems of scaling caused by the growth of the web and large on-line applications means we need to examine the freedoms we associate with open source in a new light. It's more important than ever that we rediscover the freedoms we care about and learn how to protect them in new and more relevant ways.

In this talk, Giovanni Gallucci, a search engine optimization and social media expert, a speaker, blogger and co-founder of Dexterity Media, spills out the secrets of a successful online marketing philosophy that leverages the communal strength of social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, etc. He contrasts social media against traditional marketing by providing case studies of companies that succeeded as well as those that've failed at it.

OpenIDDevCamp was a gathering to develop web-based applications that use OpenID. Attendees included web designers, developers and testers all working together over the weekend to enable OpenID on their sites or just learn more about this technology. Scott joined Phil to discus the event as well as the OpenID concept.