About 2 years ago, the legendary first BarCamp was celebrated in Palo Alto, California and had over 200 attendees. Almost out of nowhere, BarCampOrlando has sprung up and just now hit 200 registrations. Let me say that again, the first BarCampOrlando will bring in the same number of people (or even more) as the original in Palo Alto! This is a huge deal that will undoubtedly change Orlando forever, but only if our wonderful community continues to work together to make it happen.

BarCampBlock recently celebrated their 2 year anniversary with over 600 attendees. As its name implies, it took up an entire block of northern Silicon Valley, and made the future of all BarCamp's look bright. Silicon Valley is recognized as the heart of technological innovation. It is also the home of major web companies such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Ebay, etc, and an enormous source of web creativity.

Orlando has been generally thought of as a tourist (Disney, Universal, etc) and defense (Harris, Lockheed, etc) city, and rightfully so. However, in the past year or so, a surprising amount of web energy has begun to flourish into active user groups , communities, and conferences.

The Refresh06 conference brought people of international fame (Paul Boag, Andy Budd, Brian Fling, Jeremy Keith, Nate Koechley, Cameron Moll, etc) to Orlando, and the upcoming BlogOrlando looks like it will be an encore presentation to last year's hit.

Orlando is in a great position to become a contender for the next Silicon Valley of the web. Think about that for a second... that is huge!

Orlando has the second largest square footage of conference space in the world, right behind Tokyo (thanks to tourism.)

It is also home to a vast array of communities and user groups. When I say that, I don't just mean one technology, but lots of them including but not limited to Adobe, Java, Linux 1, Linux 2, .NET, PHP, Ruby, and Ubuntu .

Additionally, there are great generic web groups such as Florida Creatives and likemind that bring everyone together. There's also rumors that the old RefreshOrlando group will be reforming soon.

Orlando is also home to many universities. The University of Central Florida (UCF) has its roots in technology (it was originally Florida Technological University), and is the 6th largest university in the US. Full Sail cultivates many great designers, and DeVry is another technology university that is kind enough to host most of the local user groups.

Of course web companies are part of this whole revolution, and Central Florida has its fair share of them. It's exciting to see that many of them have decided to be sponsors of the event, including eppraisal, One Step Solutions, page12, PayPerPost, RailsEnvy, rj callison, StackFrame, and more. Another big development for the area is the beginning of Florida Venture Capital funds, such as Inflexion, to appear... which is practically necessary to reach levels comparable to the Valley.

Florida Creatives just launched a wiki that will be a community effort to document all the great groups and resources in Florida. Here you will find local groups, hangouts, resources, companies, and more as time goes on, and everyone is encouraged to contribute.

We have an unbelievable opportunity to make Central Florida a town that web fanatics will want to come be apart of. But, it's going to take each and every one of us to make it happen. Get on your blogs and social networks, and make this calling known with blog badges, posts, links, wiki editing, and more... right now! Together, we can blow those 200 registrations out of the water for the greater good of Orlando's web community.