On Wednesday, October 29th, the Lava Row crew (Hillary and myself) will be heading south to Kansas City to attend the very first Highlight Midwest.

The event, as described on the official website, is a gathering of “the region’s [Kansas City, Omaha, and Des Moines] finest entrepreneurs, technologists, social media experts, and new media success stories.”

HM was born from a shared sentiment among Midwest cities: There are hundreds of incredibly smart, passionate, creative and interesting people working on amazing things inside “Flyover Country,” but they remain hidden and ignored. It’s time to celebrate these individuals, companies and achievements.

There’s no rock star keynote speaker at Highlight Midwest — we’re all going to be on the same stage, as equals, learning from one another. The daytime events will be somewhat Barcamp-ish in style, relying on an attendee-generated schedule of presentations. The evening event will consist of community-centric panels, discussing each city’s cultural and technological “DNA,” as well as how the cities can work together to further the relevance of the Midwest.

At some point during the day Hillary and I will be presenting Cleared for Landing: Building a Social Media Business in Flyover Country. We’ll discuss the challenges and advantages of bootstrapping a company that teaches social media in little old Iowa. During the evening event, I’ll also be joining Aaron Webb on the Des Moines panel.

We are so excited to meet new friends and neighbors, and stoked to see fellow Des Moines entrepreneurial ass-kickers Andy Brudtkuhl (48Web), Daniel Shipton (Impromptu Studio) and Mike Templeton (Microblink, Dosovo) give their presentations. You may view the full list of presenters here.

And yes — because tech events aren’t anything without killer parties — there will be TweetUps! The Flying Saucer will be hosting one at 5:00 pm on the 28th, and another will take place at 810 Zone on Wednesday evening at 8:00 pm.

So, are you coming? We can’t wait to meet you at Highlight Midwest!

Here at Lava Row we’ve got an abundant supply of outdated business cards that we need to get rid of, and we’ve figured out an alternative to throwing them away.

Here’s the deal — Grab a card from Hillary or myself at tonight’s Des Moines TweetUp at The Underground. Then, your mission — should you choose to accept it — is to come up with a slogan / motto / tagline for Lava Row, write it on the card, and TwitPic it or upload it to Flickr for everyone to see. Be sure to tag it with #LavaRow. And take your time — we don’t expect inspiration to strike overnight.

We may extend the contest into future TweetUps until all the cards are gone, so if you can’t attend tonight’s event, don’t worry! The person who wins best slogan (determined by us) will have a couple of drinks bought for them at the following TweetUp.

Just to recap: Write a cool tagline for us and you could win booze! Sweet deal, right? We’ll see you tonight, and have fun!