I have tossed and turned with this site for longer than I care to admit. It originally began as a need when I was podcasting, during that time I also fell in love with blogging, which eventually turned into a full-time job for me. That is the good news, of course that meant little if any time was ever left (or made) to keep this site up and active.

Since then I have tried several times to restart and rebrand it to better suit what I was doing as a professional blogger (full-time freelancer) but it has never felt right, mainly because I did not make the time and keep making progress.

With that, I have chosen to officially kill of this blog with this final post.

Of course as a full-time blogger (freelance writer) I cannot stand the idea of being without a place to journey my experience and tell my tales.

I have had my robertnelson.com domain for a while now and always used that as a landing page of sorts, but never as a blog. I kind of like it that way and plan on keeping that the same. However I have in the past used the phrase “this is me” and now that I have my robertnelson.me domain that phrase sort of fits in perfectly.

With that, I have chosen to start blogging personally about my journey and experience as a full-time blogger (freelancer) over at robertnelson.me/thisisme.

I think it fits a little better, but more important it gives me a clean start with a new blog. Of course for the time being, (until I can get something better and custom designed) I am keeping the same template.

So, I now have a new site and new feed. A completely fresh start. Now I have to prove myself and build a community. Time to get to work…

The answer of whether network blogging is good or bad is not one that I can really give you. I would say that being a network blogger has some good points and some bad points and in order to make sure its right for you will depend on how you feel about those points. For me the good outweighs the bad, but at the same time the bad is something I try to keep fresh in my mind.

Some bad

First and perhaps most important, you lose some ability of control because it does not always matter how good you are, but how good the overall team is. Meaning that you can be writing great and drawing in the readers, but if the rest of the writers are poor then the site will suffer overall. And once the site begins to suffer, everyone both good and bad can see the effects.

Another downfall is that you have no (or little) control over how the blog operates and could be left hanging if the blog owner flakes out or even if they decide to sell out. This means that you could fire up your web browser to find the site has gone down to never return, or open your email to a bit of bad news and find that you have gotten a pay cut or worse, a new owner has come in and your services are no longer needed.

Some good

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I am not sure if its the excitement that I am still feeling from BlogOrlando, but I am thinking I may want to speak at the upcoming Tampa Bay BarCamp.

Of course that is easier said than done. You see, there are two things that are holding me back on giving a 100% go ahead on speaking.

• 1. I am not sure what I would or could speak about that would benefit others…anyone have any ideas?
• 2. Perhaps this point is holding me back a little more, but I will let you in on a not so well kept secret. I have a huge fear of public speaking and suffer from social anxiety. It bothers me just to speak with people I do not know, much less getting up in front of a group.

But the bottom line is that I am passionate about blogging and furthering myself in this industry. I know that speaking could always help me out in that respect, or more important (assuming I could get over the fear and come up with a good topic) my talk may be good enough that someone else could get something to take away from it and possibly help them move forward.

I am a professional blogger and blog for other networks, so maybe I could speak on something along that line. Maybe my experience in general and how I got into the blogging world. From finding my first job and moving on from there.

The thing is that I have never attended a BarCamp and I am not sure what kind of crowd to expect and what level they will be at. Meaning I am not sure if my knowledge will be able to help anyone at this type of event. I do have stuff to share, good points and things that I have made mistakes with.

With BarCamp coming up fast, I have plenty of thinking left to do…

The “cloud” seems to be the hit item lately, there are plenty of options for online storage, web apps and much more. It seems there is so much available at this point that many users could have a super small hard drive, just running a basic operating system and keep most if not everything off your computer.

As many that follow along here already know, I work from home as a blogger and you would think that as a home office based worker that most of my data would be locally stored. But thanks to some new (and old) programs I have found myself storing quite a bit of data in the cloud. Now don’t get me wrong, I still have most of this data also stored locally, but the cloud storage allows me to access this on multiple devices.

At this point I am using:

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Sure, most people think that blogging, or more specifically bloggers in general are really social people, but I tend to think that at least for some it proves to be quite the opposite. Of course a lot of this depends on whether you are talking about being social online or in the real world.

I am pretty social online, I chat throughout the day with other bloggers over Skype and Google Talk, and send more than my fair share of emails, but at times I can go days without dealing with a real person outside of my family.

While there are different styles of blogging, I will focus on what I know and what I do, tech blogging. Few will argue that its a hard field to get into, and a very competitive field once you are in.

This makes it difficult to break away from the computer, there is always that new idea that pops into your head for a post, or that new breaking topic that you want, or just feel the need to cover.

But that is the issue, there will always be that one more. Of course, when you are putting your all into succeeding its hard to make a break and say enough is enough, at least for a while.

Hence the reason I just finished writing 3 posts, and editing 3 others and am still working on this one at 10:33 on a Friday evening.

This is something I obviously still need to work on, knowing when enough is enough.

I have come to realize that this is not healthy, don’t get me wrong, I am healthy physically, but need to make an effort to break away to stay healthy mentally. Long story short, its time to take a break.

Strangely enough this post began as a recap of a recent local blogger meetup and my upcoming conference plans, that said I am going offline for a while.