On Sunday (12/5), I attended the first ever meeting of the CFL TBEX group. Those initials stand for Central Florida Travel Bloggers Exchange, in case you were wondering.

TBEX is an international online community of travel writers and bloggers and it’s a supportive group overall. So I was excited when Ben Reed (of Adventures with Ben) proposed forming an offline Central Florida chapter of that community.

Jeff Stanford, VP of Communications for the Orlando Science Center, spoke first, as the OSC was kind enough to donate the space for our meeting. We also got to meet Susan Lomax, VP of Publicity for the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitor’s Bureau. Looking forward to working with her on more posts for this blog.

We then did some intros of each other, and some other team exercises. But the best part for me was the open discussion near the end, where we discussed some blogger issues and the value of individual blogs like this one versus big corporate blogs dishing out travel info.

I’ve added the Orlando-centric blogs to the More Orlando Reads section of the right-side info bar (scroll down a bit to find it).

After the meeting I had a bit of free time to check out the Orlando Science Center. Some really interesting exhibits and I loved that it was so interactive. Also looking forward to providing more coverage about OSC events – especially Otronicon 2011 in January.

Oh and that dinosaur mentioned in this post’s title?  Well, have you ever had a photo taken of you and someone jumps into the picture?