This past week I had a chance to go to the first Highlight Midwest (and sure not to be the last) here in Kansas City which highlighted developers, entrepreneurs, social media, new media, ect. in the Midwest (mainly KC, Omaha, and Des Moines) in an effort to bring the community together and show the midwest is more the just a bunch of flyover states for the east and west coast.

The end result was it was a total 100% success….I met all kinds of great people from throughout the region getting to see some great projects in the works, ideas of the future, and was able to network and add some new people to follow throughout the interweb.

As I had mentioned early this is clearly an event that will happen again and you can bet I will be there…already there is some great media out there highlighting the events of the day including pictures, video, and blogs. I thought I would highlight some of them here in the post as well as I plan to post some videos up here on the site of some of the presentations I went to as well for you to enjoy. I hope to get my hands of the video from the panel at the evening session and share atleast a link if not the video embedded (keep your eyes out for that).

Blog posts about Highlight Midwest
Highlight Midwest – by Christina Maki
What I Learned At Highlight Midwest – Troy Rutter

Highlight Midwest Flickr stream
Pics or it didnt happen – pics of the evening panel by Christina Maki

Check out the recorded live stream by LiveCrunch

Another kool part of the evening session was some suprise videos from a few familiar faces….

Sarah Lacy’s Highlight Midwest Introduction from Highlight Midwest on Vimeo.

Chris Pirillo’s Highlight Midwest Introduction from Highlight Midwest on Vimeo.

Gary Vaynerchuck’s Highlight Midwest Introduction from Highlight Midwest on Vimeo.

In closing I just want to thank everyone who was in charge of the planning of this event, thank you to all those who came not only from the kc area but for those who traveled from omaha and des moines, and thank you to all those who are out there in those cities and others in the midwest showing that the midwest is a place where tech/social media can be born and can have the same impact of those from both coasts!

After all the events were over and we were all traveling back to our homes and such the question was asked where do we go from here? What do we do to keep this great thing called Highlight Midwest going? How do we help it grow even more?

We’re following each other on twitter now, let’s take that a step further and start reading each other’s blogs. Do a little exploring on people’s twitter profiles and find blogs/sites that interest you. Add at least a few of the people from each city to your RSS reader.

1. Don’t just subscribe, but commit to reading their blogs.
2. Don’t just read, take it up a notch by commenting on their blogs.
3. Don’t just comment, share their blogs with your network by tweeting about their posts.
4. Don’t just talk up their blogs, ask them to do a guest post on your blog.
5. Shake it well, repeat.

What can you do to help the midwest tech community grow and become even better!

Think about it.