For those of you who didn’t get a chance to attend BarCamp Houston, you defintely missed out because we had a blast. Paul Stamatiou has an excellent explanation and wrap-up of BarCamp, and Business 2.0 recently published an article on “unconferences” so I will spare you the details of what it means and instead share my impressions, take-aways and ideas. First of all thanks for all the kudos from those of you who attended. Marc, Chris, Erica and I really loved doing this event and are looking forward to the next one. Some observations I made…

• There are lot’s of neat things going on in Houston…and New Orleans.
• Houston has a really good footing in the podcast world with several great podcasts, podcast networks and PodcastReady.
• The interest in Ruby on Rails in growing fast. The Ruby on Rails session was a popular one. Thanks Keith.
• Everyone thinks there needs to be an increased focus on mentoring and teaching college students about what is going on in technology. (Other than Paul there was only one other college student there.)
• People in Houston (well Texas in general) don’t want to be like Silicon Valley and don’t really think it’s necessary to kick the valley’s butt. Don’t know if I agree - nothing like a little nerd competition.
• What’s hot? Web Design Workflows, Agile Development, Television 2.0, Tagsonomy (combining folksonomy with traditional taxonomy), community, BarCamp Earth.
• Odd? There was only one person there who was a DOTNET programmer. Not sure why but usually there are more than that.
• We really should allow for an hour per presentation.
• and of course…I still can’t believe people are missing out on free passes to SXSW and an iPod by not answering a few simple questions. Go figure.

All in all it was great fun. Stay tuned for Barcamp Texas to be held August 26-28 as a part of Barcamp Earth.

You can check out the Bacamp Houston photos over on Flickr. I will upload mine tomorrow now that I had The USB cable to pull them off my camera!