We had our third meeting of local Tampa bloggers and the meetup is developing every time. It is organized by Loren Baker, of Search Engine Journal. I was in attendance and we also had Mark Jaquith, one of the core developers of WordPress and a developer for B5 Media. Most of the rest of the people there are getting their feet wet in the blogosphere and it is cool to see them there. They’re starting out on a much stronger footing than I ever did – attending meetups.

I posted some more photos of the meetup over in my Flickr gallery.

I don’t care what your experience level is in the world of blogging, these types of meetups are great to go to. It is good networking and it is good to help others with things you may have figured out already. It is nice to see something developing here in the Tampa Bay area.

One of the things about Tampa is that it is a hidden powerhouse of tech. Most people think west coast when they think of tech people. San Francisco and Seattle. But, I tell you, there are a lot of big tech names living over here on the East coast. We are just more spread out and need to go a little more out of our ways to meet up.

I’ll fly to the west coast when I have to, but it kicks ass when I can meet up with a lot of great guys without going too far.