In anticipation I guess of TAR’s move, “Orange Philosophy”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/ has moved to a new site. It’s allegedly a group blog with 22 different authors, but I’ll put the over/under for the earliest date by which they’ll have all posted at roughly Christmas. The old site often felt like Mark Steen with guest posts from time to time, and that worked well enough so it doesn’t need 22 chefs in the broth.
Mark has an excellent post on “how to catch plagiarists”:http://mt.ektopos.com/orangephilosophy/archives/000004.html. My method has always been to teach obscure courses so there was little chance of plagiarism, but I’m teaching 101 in the spring so I better get up to speed on these things.
On the group blog topic, Michelle says that there’s talk of an “Arizona philosophy group blog”:http://www.platonicrelationship.com/blogger.php?p=258. This would be a good thing, though thinking about it made me realise that the blogging revolution is having less impact than I’d have hoped it might.
Looking at all the recent group blogs that have started or are planned suggests they have one thing in common: they are all geographically based. Being from Australia, it’s hard not to think about the tyranny of distance more or less all the time. (This is especially true when one spends most of one’s year in a foreign country.) The really good thing about the internet should be, I’ve always thought, that it encourages interaction based on shared interests rather than shared postcode/zipcode. But we haven’t really seen that yet.
There are no group blogs, or at least none that I know of, on mereology, or contextualism, or Hobbes studies or anything of the kind. And at some level they’d make more sense than X university blogs. We’re sort of seeing that in other disciplines with “Panda’s Thumb”:http://www.pandasthumb.org/ and “Language Log”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/, though they are both fairly general. And of course the mighty “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/ is one of the most geographically diverse blogs on the planet, as well as being one of the most diverse in terms of subject matter.
Anyway, I’m happy to see all these blogs springing up. I hope it encourages more interaction between people who would otherwise not interact because they are too far apart. Whenever I’m feeling idealistic about this blog, and the papers blog, that’s the ideal I’m aiming for. Well, that and unlimited self-promotion :-J