[mburst]

I think the secret is just to apply. You'd be surprised how few people apply to give tech talks at conferences, especially local oriented ones. If you want to give talks at more major conferences I've found it helps to have some sort of public profile about your topic.

In my case I used to blog a ton and one of my blog posts was about doing realtime processing with Django (before it was built in to the framework). So I submitted a short proposal for Djangocon and ended up getting selected to give a 3 hour tutorial talk. It was definitely a bit scary having my first major talk be 3 hours long, but as long as you know your topic pretty well you'll do great!