Sometimes, this job is, well, just a job and sometimes its a damn good wheeze, such as when I was invited to come along to the Silicon.com agenda setters panel last month. My approach was quite deliberately to try to bring to the party people who wouldn't necessarily be top o' the list but were still ground breaking in some way - hence for example Rob Pardo of World of Warcraft fame as well as all the usual suspects, Jobs, Schmidt, Benioff and the like.

The final list is here, with Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg at the top. We dont see Facebook as a major business tool, but I have to agree with another agenda setter, JP Rangaswami, that its rattling a few cages in corporate land. That doesn't mean traditional IT business leaders have been pushed out - with John Chambers, Diane Greene and Mark Hurd rubbing shoulders with the new media darlings and offshore tycoons.

Fascinating to me was how much there is of the IT industry about which I have very little understanding. We talked about the inner workings ofventure capital for example, and the influence of Asian manufacturing. Great, mind expanding stuff.

I can't wait 'til next year - if they'll have me of course!