DailyKos has an article posted by a person who seems to be knowledgable in the field of oil booming. The article itself is well done, even if a bit caustic. However, the comments on the article are also of much higher quality than usual for similar articles and sites, and I found even briefly reading them quite informative.

The basic synopsis is that while booming can be very effective at recovering oil from the surface of water, protecting the beaches and preserving the environment, it isn't being deployed in a manner consistent with these goals in the gulf. The images in the article, and in particular one of the images in the comments demonstrates this quite clearly. Another side point made is that there is a deep schism between the drilling engineers and the booming engineers, and cross-training is not normally seen as valuable in the industry.

The How Stuff Works blog has another summary of the article.