Reflections on blogging and me

My blog's more than a year old now, and altogether I'm pretty happy about how this whole blogging thing has gone. There are downsides -- I spend way more time on the internet than I should, and that's dangerous to someone writing a dissertation. But I'm pleased to have a web presence that far-flung friends can interact with, I'm happy that smart people in politics and philosophy occasionally check out my blog, and I'm really excited about being invited as a weekend guestblogger by Ezra Klein.

In general, I'm going to be pushing the weekday postings in a more philosophical direction here over the next couple months. This is mostly due to a need to get cracking on dissertation-writing so I can go on the job market next year. Lately I've been saving my full-length post ideas for Ezra, and that's probably going to continue. Of course, I'll still say my bit about exciting sudden events like the Miers nomination, and if I find interesting/funny news or a great post by someone else, I'll link it here.

There's a bunch of political stuff I'm really happy to have learned and done over the past 15 or so months of blogging -- last night at the bar with some other philosophers, I was giving this semi-speech on the manifold virtues of single-payer health care, which I didn't know the faintest thing about when I started blogging. People seemed to be impressed -- both with the arguments and the fluidity with which I presented them. (Big thanks here go to Ezra, Brad, and Matt, who are responsible for my increased knowledge.) On Monday I'm going to go see John Edwards speak here in Austin, which I might not have even known about if someone from the Edwards organization hadn't seen my blog and emailed me about it. So, in violation of the philosophy-weekdays trend I'm trying to introduce, you might see a political post from me Monday night.