My colleague (and head of department) David Estlund has a blog! It’s Occasionalities. It’s not designed to be a philosophy blog, though philosophers are always tempted to put a philosophical spin on things. I’m tempted to comment on the “What good are blogs” post, but maybe another time. There’s a long post I’ve been thinking about about how sometimes it would be nice to post something that didn’t go to everyone in philosophy. But that post ends up sounding fairly platitudinous, because the examples are all, well you get the picture. Anyway,while talking about Blogger…
Kaye Trammell and James Russell have noted that Blogger now has an inbuilt RSS feed – details here. Third-party RSS feeds for Blogger blogs have been pretty bad in the past, so hopefully this will be better. If you don’t know why RSS is good for you, read Kaye and Dave Winer. Let me add another reason – I don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. Anyone who is running a Blogger blog should turn on this feature and display the feed link prominently. (And if you’re a blog I’ve discussed before, leave a comment here saying that you’ve turned the feed on, so I might start reading you again!)
Opiniatrety is off to a flying start – leaving my light posting to shame. I hope Matt doesn’t catch Zadie Smith syndrome: put all your ideas down on paper all at once and then struggle to come up with a follow-up. Of course, if I could write a book as good as White Teeth I’d be happy to trade that for a few years of mediocrity, so maybe the syndrome is not all that bad.
One of Matt’s posts picks up on this question posed by Geoff Pullum a while ago. Jonathan Ichikawa also chimes in. I feel less bad about not replying to it now. I think I agree with what Matt and Jonathan say.
If I had a horse in the Democratic Primary I think I’d be so nervous today that I couldn’t think. Even without having any strong preferences the excitement of it all is a little overwhelming. For what it’s worth, I think my preference ordering right now is Edwards, Clark, Dean, Kerry, (gasping chasm), Lieberman, Kucinich, Sharpton. They won’t finish that way today, but there’s actually a slim chance (very slim) that they will finish that way in the overall delegate count, especially if Kerry collapses next Tuesday.