I’m blogging now over here at Occam’s Razr.

Enjoy.

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.)

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.

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.

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!

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.

Thanks to the Wayback MachineArchive, you can see the birth of PR-Squared, before its very recent move.

Here’s a link to his first post in the archive, talking about the San Francisco 49ers’ media training debacle.

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.

(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.