This is turning into a trend. In the past few weeks we’ve seen new group blogs started by philosophy graduate students at Syracuse (“Orange Philosophy”:http://www.orangephilosophy.blogspot.com/), Rochester (“What is the Name of This Blog?”:http://urphilosophy.blogspot.com/) and now Brown (“Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/).

They all look very interesting, though I’d rather that the Syracuse and Rochester blogs didn’t use Blogger. Last week I did a workshop on blogging at Wesleyan (wonderful people and place, by the way) so I was looking into the possibilities for blog programs. And I was very impressed by “Typepad”:http://typepad.com/. Obviously many readers will know how nice Typepad is, but I hadn’t realised just how user-friendly it is. I was stunned by how easy it is to customise your blog. Admittedly all typepad blogs look kinda alike unless you really get involved with the underlying HTML code, but you can at least make your blog a little distinctive without having to learn any HTML at all. And having integrated comments is obviously a huge advantage over Blogger.

To be sure Typepad is not free. But given the size of these group blogs, the cost of even the most expensive Typepad package will only be a dollar or two per month per blogger. If these blogs are meant to be long-term options, I’d think this is a very worthwhile investment.

UPDATE: To everyone coming over here from Leiter, two quick notes. First, the days are already longer here than they are down in the South. Admittedly not warmer, but at least longer. Second, if you’re a regular reader of philosophy journals, please take the “survey on journal quality”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/journals/Journals_Survey.htm.