Given my relatively slow pace of posting in recent weeks, I’m a bit surprised to see that I’ve made about 70 posts since joining the team of 14 contributors, most of whom are based in the Atlanta area.

The front page of Peach Pundit stays pretty lively, with multiple posts every weekday. There’s a rightward lean to the blog, for sure, but the site provides indispensable information and vibrant commentary about Georgia politics.

While there’s obviously some national political commentary that creeps in, the emphasis is on the state.

Today, unsurprisingly, Chris Cillizza’s blog The Fix at The Washington Post once again listed Peach Pundit as the top political blog in Georgia.

Peach Pundit shares the honor with Georgia Tip Sheet, which is also a great resource (even if it has far fewer posts per day on average).

If you take a look at Peach Pundit, consider that we are writing for free. We all might have some reason to engage in self-promotion, but it’s hard to see how any PR benefits could match the time that gets put into posts. The contributors to blogs like Peach Pundit are actually interested in public policies that will improve the quality of life for the state’s residents.

Congrats to Peach Pundit editor Charlie Harper, as well as assistant editors Mike Hassinger, Buzz Brockway, and Stefan Turkheimer; publisher Clayton Wagar; and editor emeritus Erick Erickson.

But that’s a national picture. The Savannah economy — at least in downtown and surrounding neighborhoods — continues to attract a surge of investment.

Back in June, I wrote a column about the many major projects announced in 2012: Series of big investments bode well for Savannah.

Today’s City Talk column builds on that one: New downtown Savannah plans include new hotel, townhouses, beer garden

Aerial view of dining and beer garden at Moon River that will go before the Historic Review Board this week.

We’re seeing some really impressive momentum building in these developments.

If you want even more background on these trends, check out my post with various links about a recent AJC article: Savannah has something Atlanta wants: a real city center

I’ve been posting there about some issues that I used to post routinely about here, like bank failures. But relatively few people looked at posts on this blog about wonky economic issues regarding state revenue and such, and Peach Pundit provides a much bigger platform for putting issues out there.

My recent Savannah Morning News columns are in a feed in the right sidebar here, and you can click here if you’re interested in seeing all my posts at Peach Pundit.

A few of my recent posts that seem especially important, at least to me:

• Two more Georgia bank failures: First Cherokee Bank in Woodstock and Georgia Trust Bank in Buford
• Georgia revenue picture brighter than a year ago, but still well below pre-recession levels
• A look at the partisan leanings of each T-SPLOST region
• House banking committee chair joins his Senate counterpart in the FDIC spotlight
• The importance of state tax credits for filmmaking in Georgia

That’s a followup to last week’s post:
Jobs recovery: A tale of two Georgias

In those posts, I look at the payroll jobs estimates and the civilian labor force estimates for metro areas across the state. The pretty clear picture that emerges is that Atlanta and environs are seeing pretty solid job growth, but other areas — most notably Savannah, Augusta, and Dalton — are seeing continued year-over-year job losses.

I also am still looking for advertisers for those 125×125 squares at the top of the right sidebar. Click here for more information.

I have been experimenting for a while with various ways of presenting some of my ongoing photography. As regular readers might know, I have a cheap DSLR body with a very good lens that I’ve been taking along with me — especially for some of the great bands coming through town. Recent photo posts include G. Love & Special Sauce, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, These United States, and the SEAM Fashion Show at Brockington Hall. Sometime later today, I’ll be posting some pics of last night’s gig by American Aquarium at The Jinx.

Anyway, I have a couple of boards up on Pinterest, but I also decided that I will be posting some photos, many with links to the appropriate post on this blog, on a new tumblr page. It has taken me longer than I would have thought to get the knack for how the kids interact on tumblr. Still, I like the various template options and I just personally like the effect of being able to see pictures from so many events and places in one glance. If you’re interested, click here for my tumblr.

As always, you can find my recent Savannah Morning News City Talk and Man About Town columns in a feed in the right sidebar.

I talked about that issue in a broader statewide context in a new post yesterday on Peach Pundit: Jobs recovery: a tale of two Georgias

In that post I noted that if we subtract the job growth in 4 central Georgia metros (Atlanta, Gainesville, Macon, and Athens) from the statewide total, then we’re in negative territory for the rest of the state. The economy technically left recession about 3 years ago, and we’re still seeing year-over-year job losses in most of the state?

In the post, I posit that the less populated areas of the state are simply lagging the housing bust. In the comments, I mention another possibility: the damage done to rural economies by the 2011 immigration law that has cost farmers tens of millions of dollars.

Here’s the latest graph for Savannah metro area payroll employment from the Ga. Department of Labor:

In that graph, you’re seeing some of the seasonality of employment — and you’re not seeing the big jump in jobs that we should see in this graph in the spring.

For those who missed the news, I’m now a regular contributor to Peach Pundit, the state’s most important political blog.

It’s edited by Charlie Harper, whom some Savannahians might know because of his regular op-ed columns in the SMN.

I’ve got a new post up today — Savannah, Turnout, and TSPLOST — arguing that a weak Democratic turnout in Chatham County on July 31 will doom the coastal region TSPLOST.

Last week I wrote a couple of posts: State revenues still far behind pre-recession levels and Widespread confusion over economic rationale for harbor deepening.

For the time being, I’ll probably do occasional posts here to let readers know what else they can find over there.

Cheers.

There’s definitely a rightward lean to Peach Pundit, but for the most part there’s lots of rational discussion, epitomized by editor Charlie Harper’s columns.

I’ve been reading Peach Pundit for a number of years and have occasionally commented on posts. I’ve never met any of the front page contributors in person — I’ve never even spoken with any of them on the phone — but the internet has an amazing capacity to pull people together. Since the blog lacked anyone with particular expertise on Savannah politics, Charlie asked me to do a guest post about the 2011 city election. I sent him the most boring post ever, but that didn’t stop him from asking me a couple of weeks ago to become one of about a dozen regular front page contributors.

I’ll probably only be doing about two posts per week, and I’ll be able to reach far more people regarding statewide issues than I currently do either on this blog or in my Savannah Morning News columns.

If the necessary time to post doesn’t materialize, or if it turns out I’m not a good fit for the blog, I’ll cease active involvement after a trial period.

My first two posts are now up at Peach Pundit. One is just a brief introduction. The other is a rather lengthy post — one that will be repetitive to many of my Savannah readers — about the Corps of Engineers’ economic rationale for SHEP. That details of that analysis have been largely brushed pushed aside by do-or-die rhetoric from state and local leaders.

I knew I was spending too much time engaged in discussions on Facebook that simply vanished the next day. Sure, those threads would be on someone’s wall or timeline, maybe for years, but the conversations were in effect dead.

And I knew too that people like me — ones with large numbers of Facebook contacts and who treat Facebook as a public forum — are basically supplying the for-profit Facebook with free content. YouTube has a compensation method for users who create content that drives the most traffic, but not Facebook.

I knew I was reading and thinking about some issues with more depth and breadth than I could reflect in my Savannah Morning News columns, which add up to somewhere around 1700 words in a typical week. In those columns I’m also largely limited to local issues, so I didn’t really have a place to share thoughts and information about bigger economic and political issues. Nor was there an easy way to make a public endorsement of a band, an idea, a particular article, or other things that wouldn’t fit neatly in a column.

I knew that journalists of today are probably going to be better off in the long run if they put some real effort into their personal brands. I love my longstanding freelance gig as a Savannah Morning News columnist, but that can’t — and shouldn’t — last forever.

Early on, against the advice of several smart people, I opted to create one blog with a catch-all of categories. Maybe I’d still be better off if I had a separate economics blog or a separate music blog, but that’s not really how my mind works. In my mind, advocating for a band that I’ve just heard for the first time in Savannah is closely connected to other issues regarding urban form, effective zoning, economic vibrancy, and cultural enrichment. So the seemingly scattered subjects of my posts don’t seem scattered to me.

Now that I’ve seen how easy it actually is to create, develop, and maintain a blog, I’m not surprised that there are so many blogs out there. But I am increasingly surprised that there aren’t more bloggers stepping forward to fill obvious niches. For example, Savannah’s music scene could benefit from several ambitious music blogs — it’s puzzling that we don’t have more in that regard.

We probably use the word “community” too often when describing online interactions, but I do feel like my blog, with all its various topics, and my subsequently beefed up Twitter presence have made me more engaged with broader societal conversations. It’s easy to get lost in this huge town square of sometimes-competing and often-redundant ideas — and it’s easy to feel really small in that square.

But there are myriad benefits to being part of the conversation(s).

In a recent post — My Own Crossroads — on his fairly new blog AtlCrossroads, Michael Mumper finds that the divergences and crossroads about which he writes — the need for us all to come together in crafting good public policy — can apply to his personal life too. Along the way, he gives me and a few others nice shout outs:

But taking a lesson from writers Maria Saporta in Atlanta, Bill Dawers in Savannah, and Jason Pye in Covington, weâ€re more than one-track people, and it might be good for us every once in a while to acknowledge some other interests, challenges, strivings and victories.

Over at Peach Pundit, Charlie Harper has lately made a couple of introspective posts connecting the public and the personal: My Award Is Your Award and Two Anniversaries. In the latter post, he writes compellingly about the transition from anonymous blogger to named blogger:

I had assumed that would be the end of my writing, as people were paying attention to this mystery character because someone had decided I was an influential insider and I did nothing to change that perception. Once revealed as a nobody and a public failure, I assumed there would be no interest in anyone reading, or my continuing. Luckily, I was wrong, and instead, I became busier. Three years later Iâ€m now the editor of Peach Pundit, have a daily column appearing in print media, and make occasional appearances on radio and TV.

Compelling ideas, clear and concise writing, and finding ways to make oneself heard without shouting — those qualities are a lot more important for serious bloggers than political connections, educational backgrounds, or job histories. I occasionally tell my writing students at Armstrong that writers are like chefs — they’re both constantly judged and their education is irrelevant if consumers feel like they’re getting a quality product.

As Michael Mumper says, “We’re more than one-track people.” We are not forced to narrow our interests, our beliefs, and our circles as we get older — we can expand them. We don’t have to see a clear goal before we launch ourselves into a new project.