Anyone who lives in Central Florida who's into anything IT-related, or design, or business management, or marketing.. or anyone who wasn't otherwise busy, should have been at BarCamp Orlando this past Saturday. With three rooms for presentations, there were plenty of sessions to cover just about any interest. Needless to say, it was awesome.

One of the best presentations, or rather two presentations, that I attended were from Murray Izenwasser who gave two great talks on business use of social media and, surprise surprise, how most companies don't have a clue of what they're doing. A key point was that just randomly throwing out a Facebook page or a Twitter account won't magically make the world shine on you. Contrary to popular opinion, if you're trying to build a social media following, if you build it they won't come, it takes a lot of planning and effort. I personally saw this at a company I worked with a few years back where the owner read an article about how blogs were great so decided to start a blog.. only then rather than letting it happen organically forced a rigid control over it so it became little better than their news announcements in a different form.

Another great session was, as always, Rob Dempsey talking about his favorite topics - agile management and scrum - always a good presenter.

A session I'm really sorry I missed was regarding IT in healthcare, particularly when it was one of the few that mentioned Drupal (my CMS of choice these days), but I'm looking forward to the notes being made available, I've heard it was very interesting and well presented.

So a huge thanks to Gregg Pollack, Eric Marden and everyone else who helped out! This year's was definitely full of win! I'm really looking forward to next year's...? :-)