Downtown Bryan, TX recently stepped it up a notch when our good friends over at Square One Bistro began announcing the lunch special and soup of the day over twitter. Yes, every day around 11:15, I get a little update with what’s being served for lunch.

I think this is a great way for non-tech businesses to have somewhat persistent contact with their users, err, patrons. I’m sure plenty of restaurants have an RSS feed of different things like events and specials - it’s time they move them to Twitter.

The Creative Space, the coworking space we operate out of, held BarCampTexas a few months ago. Travis Ward wore the shirt today and I sorta got to thinking about the process that unfolded as we planned our first BarCamp. I thought I’d post a few tips to sorta help those out there that might be planning a BarCamp for the first time.

1. Distribute the workload - Plain and simple, don’t do everything yourself. Let folks take on tasks and let them have ultimate responsibility. I think the understanding of “this is a group thing” will make people realize that they will be letting everyone down if they don’t get it done.
2. Promote, promote, promote - Living in Bryan/College Station, we knew we had to get out and really get the word out around the state. This meant taking a few trips to Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and talking with community leaders in those cities to ensure they energized the locals.
3. Get sponsors early - Before you choose a date, make sure you have a plan of attack ready for gathering sponsorship money. BarCamps can be done on a shoe-string budget, but if you have certain things in mind and a level of quality that may take some donated funds. Make sure you know the fiscal realities before you commit to a date.
4. Nice quality shirts - Spend the extra $250 for American Apparel. There’s nothing like a good shirt you’ll wear over and over again rather than a low-quality shirt you’ll just throw in a drawer and forget about. AA usually costs about $1-2 more than your average Hanes, but you’ll get so many more wears.
5. Access to alcohol - While not everyone drinks, make sure that there is at least access to alcohol towards the end of the night. Visitors will become more social and things will end on a good note. Besides, who doesn’t like a party?

If you have any other tips, just tweet them out using the hashtag #barcamptips. Or leave them in the comments section below. Thanks.

I just wanted to let you folks know that we hit 5,000 users of hashtags yesterday around 8PM. Thanks to everyone who has ever used a hashtag!

I’ve been playing around with Fluid, the free site specific browser for Mac OS X Leopard, for a while now and recently came up with a really interesting way to browse hashtags.org. I’ll briefly cover the steps involved to browse hashtags.org using coverflow and fluid.

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