Housekeeping
It’s been one year of blogging for Andrea Weckerle over at New Millenium PR.
She jumped right in, and was always kind enough to comment and share her opinions and experiences. (That’s why she’s in the Sez Who? section.)
And a happy first birthday at that, for Kami Huyse over at Communication Overtones!!
Out of the gate, she started with a purpose and a perspective. If you care about the future of PR, add her to the daily read list.
Time is winding down on Accentuate the Positive, and I can’t leave without saying thanks to a few of the people who deserve it.
In no particular order:
Thanks to B.L. Ochman and Jeremy Pepper, for doing what you do so well, and inspiring me to enter the blogodrome (whether you knew it or not.)
Thanks to Peter Himler, for taking the time to say hi, and showing the real power of the flat world.
Thanks to the Texans, John Wagner, Scott Baradell, and Kami Huyse. Three very different sorts of blogs, with three independent perspectives and audiences. I look forward to my occasional invasions and incursions into your comment boxes. I will in fact mess with Texas.
Thanks to Allan Jenkins, Eric Eggertson, and the rest of the Nobodies. If you don’t know who you are, that’s okay. You’re nobody. (And Eric — Accentuate the Positive, 3.0 is available…)
Thanks to Steven Silvers, Todd Defren, and Andrea Weckerle for bringing wicked smarts to a profession that doesn’t always call for it.
Thanks to Ben and Jackie and Steve Rubel for finding cool niches and keeping them fresh.
Thanks also to Gary Goldhammer and Terry Heaton — two very different people who are trying to make sense of the future of journalism.
Thanks as well to all my Birmingham Peeps — thanks to the Combloggerator, I’ve saved so much time wasting time! And thanks to Drew for being the coolest preacher ever, and not saying anything about my quoting Janis Joplin in our Galatians class.
To all the others who should have been here, but weren’t: I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll amend this later.
Oh yeah — why the blog-freeze? I’ve been hired as the Communications and Government Relations Director for the American Red Cross, Southeast Service Area. I’m the key support for both of those functions for 116 chapters in five states. Including Florida. In hurricane season.
Simply put, there will be no freelancing, and no seminars anytime in the near future. Positive Position Media Consulting will emerge from mothballs one day years from now, but for the time being needs to be dormant. As for the blog, I need to focus my attention on learning the new job and the tasks at hand.
(Yes Kami — I will still comment from time to time. That goes for all of you.)
I’ve got e-mails for a lot of you, but if you want to send me anything, try ike AT pigott DOT name. I’ll be sure to bug as many of you as possible if I ever start blogging again.
And just for fun — be sure to link to this post. If I’m going out, I’m going out strong!
(Stay tuned — your parting gift arrives tomorrow.)
Ike.
A Happy 2-Year Blogiversary to the hardest working man in the Capitol!
Tex Turner over at Watching Washington has a stellar resume, and it seems like just yesterday that the Watchdog started barking in cyberspace. (It all started here.)
He’s done a lot more with pod-and-vod-casting than I have, and if you’re not one of his online minions, then you ought to be!
Start the fireworks early for Jeremy Pepper, who celebrates three years of blogging at POP! PR Jots!
His abuse of the exclamation point aside, Jeremy is a voice of reason in public relations. He asks a lot of the questions that need to be asked, and doesn’t drink the kool-aid.
A Happy Two-Year Blogiversary to Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications in Boston and San Francisco.
Thanks to the Wayback MachineArchive, you can see the birth of PR-Squared, before its very recent move.
Happy 1st Blogiversary to Steven Silvers over at Scatterbox. Steven’s one of those guys that isn’t worried about momentum or schedules. He just writes very profound things and doesn’t pad them with filler. He’s a must-read.
Here’s a link to his first post in the archive, talking about the San Francisco 49ers’ media training debacle.
A Happy 1st Blogiversary to Peter Himler, who brought “The Flack” online a year ago today.
Peter’s got that good mix of old-school PR street smarts and new-wave communications theory. He gets it.
He was also one of the first “real grownups” to notice my humble little blog, back in the old blogspot days. Without Peter, my readership might still be in the single digits, instead of firmly entrenched in the couple-dozen range.
Happy Blogiversary to the Media Orchard, from Dallas’ Idea Grove.
(Sure, the first entry goes back to February of 2005, but that was a backdated item. The Orchard’s first fruit was a year ago today.)
Scott Baradell is a kindred spirit — a former newsie who uses his skills to help others communicate. There’s nothing ignoble about that.
I’m willing to ditch this if there are enough complaints… but you may notice that I’ve added a string to the front of the title.
I’m told that an increasing number of people use aggregators and are melding their own feeds. Those who run their own blogs understand the source of the content, but many many more are inclined to think it’s all original to the aggregator (Yahoo or anyone else.)
At least for now, AtP2: ought to be a reminder that a post comes from “Accentuate the Positive, 2.0.”
Remember this little snarky comment at the end of my last post?
“(When is someone going to develop the AJAX blog template layout, letting you drag and drop to design?)”
Well, it’s here. It’s called Logahead.
It still is in Beta, and has some issues.
Call me psychic. The thing went live on the 25th — more than a full day after I called for it.
No, I am not ready to switch to Logahead. But I am interested to see how it does, and who installs it.
Too many new tools and gizmos… and I am a sucker for trying them out.
At least I have hacked my sidebar so I can keep some things hidden.
Tips of the “tech hat” to Scott and Kami for hitting me with a double-barrelled wakeup call. Maybe I’ve been in Texas too long.
You’ll notice that the last menu item on the right is “Recent Faves.” That has links to the three most recent posts on my Technorati Favorites list, followed by my last five comments on others’ blogs.
Thank goodness these things are automating themselves now. (When is someone going to develop the AJAX blog template layout, letting you drag and drop to design?)
I don’t do memes here, normally. But it’s Saturday.
Four jobs I’ve had
- Television Reporter
- PR Guy
- Director
- Inventory Control
Four movies I can watch over and over
- Shawshank Redemption
- Office Space
- Best in Show
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Four TV shows I love to watch
- Grey’s Anatomy
- Lost
- Boston Legal
- Earl/The Office
Four places I’ve been on vacation
- Alaska
- Gatlinburg
- Jackson Hole
- DisneyWorld
Four favorite dishes
- Cantonese Chicken
- Taco Casa Sanchos
- Poppy seed Chicken Casserole
- Prime Rib
Four places I’d rather be
- In the mountains
- Practicing Kung Fu
- Writing my screenplay
- Working on my legal project
Four bloggers I am tagging
Four websites I visit everyday
Light PR content here — just a few thoughts about why I’m here and why you’re reading it.
Those thoughts and more are in the “About this blog” section near the upper right of the page:
This is inspired by some of my PR-blogging colleagues who have addressed their reasons for being on the web.
This makes sense. Before you can persuade anyone of anything, you have to tell your story. If you don’t lay your motives on the table immediately, you’ll never get past those initial questions of “Why is he here? What is he selling? What’s in this for him?”
Consider yourself warned.