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The pump and thrive of Boston's genius excites the young college-educated professionals the region attracts in droves. The vibe on the streets is contagious even for the most introverted and bookish, perhaps especially so, since in many ways Boston contends for the title of our nation's intellectual capitol. I tend toward the extroverted, so any visit to Boston is an outgoing one for me - a place where thinking is mixed with the experiential.

With 90 colleges or universities within 60 miles, it is no small wonder that Boston has one of the highest percentages of residents with four-year-plus college degrees - 35.6 percent - among major U.S. cities.

In Cambridge, across the Charles River and a subway stop away from downtown Boston, 65.1 percent of the residents have four-year or higher college degrees. Nationally, 24.4 percent of the population has four-year or higher college degrees.

The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council hosted the Council of Regional Information Technology Associations several weeks ago in Boston's Back Bay, a few blocks from Fenway Park. My trip to the seminar inspires this post.

The New Mexico Information Technology and Software Association has been a member of CRITA for eight years, along with 50 other regional technology councils around the United States and Canada. The executives for the member associations get together twice a year to swap organizational best-practices.

CRITA provides an excellent glimpse into what other regions are doing to connect and bolster their tech sectors. Visiting the other tech regions where CRITA holds its meetings provides firsthand views of what is going on across the country. Some of the successes among CRITA peer associations are astounding to behold.

Phil Garcia, NMITSA's director of operations, and I represented NMITSA at the Boston CRITA meeting. Garcia, a Houston/NASA native, is a recent UNM graduate with a degree in economics and a former intern with Verge, one of New Mexico's early-stage venture-capital firms.

A highlight of the trip was touring the vaunted MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the MIT Media Lab, two of the top labs of their kind in the world. The Media Lab is mecca for me.

For parents or grandparents with children in the readership, check out Scratch and Cricket, Media Lab products that give kids easy access to novel, creative and fun programming and construction projects.

Another highlight of the trip was catching up with Carlos Cashman. Cashman, an MIT grad and recent ex-pat from Albuquerque, has joined his second booming tech startup, CourseAdvisor.com. Cashman hangs in the now-trendy South Boston, a place with urban bump.

Rory O'Connor, a friend and MIT grad who was a post-doc at Sandia Labs, was not at home in Boston. O'Connor built cluster supercomputers in his kitchen that he sold to major universities and labs when he lived in Albuquerque. O'Connor is now rocking and rolling with a RFID startup, QID Technologies, one of the top companies in the MIT $100,000 business plan competition in 2006.

East coast cities like Boston have generational densities in ethnic neighborhoods, business districts and economies, which have flowed and thickened over centuries - blurring boundaries municipally if not culturally.

Boston's storied heritage creates a rich milieu with a strong red-bricked sense of place and an Atlantic salty-sweet flavor of its own.

Out West, cities and cultural mixes are relatively much newer on the whole by population measure, although some of the cities here started as outposts before the Pilgrims landed. Recent migration trends make Western cities our nation's newest open-sourcing melting pots of sorts, as old or new as our quaint Route 66 may seem.

Looking eastward and westward, old-economy to new-economy, NMITSA brings the best of the tech business cultures home. Meanwhile, I am working on O'Connor and Cashman.

Burge is president of the New Mexico IT & Software Association and principal at Proactive Teams.