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…

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.

Well, successful by my standards at least, hopefully others felt the same way. Of course with being married and having two young kids its not often that I get to venture out, especially without the company of young children and after dark. So not only being around other web geeks, but in a grown up setting works well for me.

The meetup was setup by Jeremiah Owyang, who works as a Sr Analyst at Forrester Research in Social Computing and lives no where near the Tampa area. It’s funny how it took someone from out of town to kick us into gear. It was great that Jeremiah thought of doing this and it was really nice to meet others bloggers and web-oriented folks in the area, even though we seem to be spread out in some cases up to 45 minutes away from Downtown Tampa.

We met informally at Cheap in Soho and quickly found lots to talk about. Hopefully now that the ball has began to roll, we (as Tampa bloggers) can keep it moving. Josh, who was at the meetup went ahead and registered a domain for the area, TampaBloggers.com. Hopefully he will develop it into something cool and help us all stay connected and at the same time keep us all in the loop for future meetups.

Hey, when is that next one scheduled for?