Downtown Cartel, a member company of the Creative Space, was one of the hosts for BarCampTexas. Ben gave a talk on test driven development. A panel of folks from the Creative Space, including our own Cody Marx Bailey, talked about our co-working implementation in beautiful downtown Bryan. All in all, it was a great success. The beer flowed, the talks went late into the night, and a stack of business cards were obtained.

It was really nice to meet a lot of the folks from around the state that do the same kind of stuff we do. I think we surprised a lot of the people that came who had never heard of Bryan/College Station, TX.

We’re busy working on our next event with the Creative Space, but we don’t want to let the cat out of the bag quite yet.

We’ve been working hard on this latest roll out. We cleaned up more parts of the already spiffy clean site as well as some really really neat looking graphs. Instead of just providing a 24 hour spark line we’ve now included a 3 month history. Check out the macworld tag for instance. The spike was the day of and the long tail afterwards is the rest of the reactions over the next few days. By now it’s pretty much stopped.

We’ll be at Margarita Rocks at 7pm tonight for RefreshBCS’s January happy hour. Stop by and say hello.

Location: 1601 Texas Ave S College Station, TX 77840 (979) 680-0600

We’ve launched a new portion of hashtags.org for the specific purpose of tracking the #macworld event coming up tomorrow. Any tweet with #macworld will be index and archived along with any other hashtag into that site (along with the mainsite). We’re doing this to up the signal and down the noise. Check it out: macworld.hashtags.org.

Downtown Cartel and the rest of the Creative Space will be spending the day in Houston on Thursday, January 17. We are coming down to see some of our friends, supporters, and folks we’ve heard about but never met face to face. Here’s how the trip is looking right now:

• Wednesday
  • Leave The Creative Space at 5:30.
  • Arrive in Houston for a delicious dinner (suggestions welcome).
  • Maybe go out for some music/dessert.
  • Head to the hotel downtown.
• Thursday
  • 8am - 10am > Open Coffee Club
  • 10am - 11am > Jelly Coworking Space
  • 11am - 12pm > Houston Technology Center
  • 12pm - 1:30pm > Lunch (suggestions welcome)
  • 1:30pm - 3pm > Pop Labs
  • 3pm - 5pm > Schipul
  • 5:30pm > Dinner

We’re really excited about the trip and hopefully we’ll represent the Bryan tech community well. We’ll be traveling with:

• Always Creative
• Building Process
• Erickson Media Group
• Michael Cummings Photography

We’re looking for some community feed back for the next round of developments. We’ve got some ideas of our own, but we wanted to see what our users had in mind. Leave a comment and let us know what you want down the road with hashtags.org.

We recently redesigned the site a bit - mainly cleaning up the sidebar and standardizing the layout so everything is uniform across the site. Brian added some nifty aggregated media stuff on the right side using jQuery & Yahoo Pipes.

GeekAustin Happy Hour Details: Geek Austin Happy Hour Date: Tuesday, January 8th, 7-9PM Location: J Blacks 710 W. 6th St., Suite B, Austin, Texas 78701

CES is kicking off in a few days and we’d like to suggest a few of you who will be attending to use the #ces hashtag while you’re there. If enough folks there use the #ces tag we should be able to create a nice river of real-time information on the #ces page.