I spent Friday at ConvergeSouth, a free conference for users and wannabe users of web 2.0 technologies, held at NC A&T State University in my hometown of Greensboro, NC. I'm an organizer of the conference, and I moderated a couple of panels.

About 250 people turned out to learn how to make better videos, drive traffic to their blogs, use the web for marketing, and so on, and to hear experts like Robert Scoble and Anil Dash discuss topics like social networking and the online political campaign.

ConvergeSouth is a direct descendant of a regional bloggers' conference that I helped organize with other local folks in 2004. That event was itself inspired by Dave Winer's seminal BloggerCon at Harvard's Berkman Center in 2003. The founding motto of ConvergeSouth was "Creativity on the web for all people." We've worked with local foundations to keep it free and accessible, and we have been fortunate that A&T donates the space. All that helps make it the most diverse tech-related event I've ever attended, in terms of race and gender and fields of interest.

Why do you care? Because it shows the grassroots enthusiasm for creative activity online. We've had plenty of big names in the 2.0 world over the years, from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to Jay Rosen of PressThink and Winer himself, but many of the sessions are headed by local folks who share their knowledge with their peers. The crowd is made up of regular folks, not techies -- your customers and your employees. This stuff matters to them, and they want to do it themselves, and to share the fire with others once it's lit.

Pay attention. Your next big idea, or your next competitor, could come from flyover country.