Happy First Birthday, The Splintered Mind

Today, The Splintered Mind is one year old. (Let's hope it doesn't take 'til age 38 to peak!) A few reflections on my first year of blogging:

* It's a lot of work, but I like the discipline of posting on a MWF schedule. Every philosopher should have three thoughts a week good enough to be worth sharing in a casual way, with a forgiving audience.

* I am delighted with the readership of the blog. Comments are substantive and thoughtful (and polite!); and they often lead me to (or force me to) refine my thinking, or better understand potential objections, or see precedents. It's like contantly being in a (slow-paced) philosophical conversation. And I, as a philosopher, tend to learn more from and be more motivated by conversation than anything else.

* Blogging helps teach humility. Working on my own, it often seems to me that various things are obvious or obviously false, brilliant or ridiculous. But if I put it that way in the blog, people will call me out. I'm too often wrong to get away with being arrogant!

Since its launch one year ago, this blog has had a bit over 40,000 "unique visitors" (each new day someone visits, that person counts as a new unique visitor). I'd estimate that about half of the visitors were looking for this blog or following a link and about half happened upon it as the result of a topical search.

The monthly stats:
Apr 2006: 38 visitors
May 2006: 511 visitors
Jun 2006: 445 visitors
Jul 2006: 1642 visitors
Aug 2006: 1945 visitors
Sep 2006: 1922 visitors
Oct 2006: 2230 visitors
Nov 2006: 8320 visitors
Dec 2006: 2952 visitors
Jan 2007: 6707 visitors
Feb 2007: 4025 visitors
Mar 2007: 4340 visitors
Apr 2007: 5226 visitors (so far)

Although these numbers don't reach anything like the lofty heights of Leiter's blog (for understandable reasons!), I'm quite happy with them. Surely, these are many more people than read my articles; and my impression is that the readership is largely advanced students and youngish professors of philosophy. And if too many people read my blog, I wouldn't have enough time to respond individually to nearly every comment, which is my current practice!

The peaks in Nov. 2006 and Jan. 2007 are due entirely to my two most popular, most linked blog posts:

Most-Cited Ethicists in the Stanford Encyclopedia (and its companion Most-Cited Philosophers of Mind and Language in the Stanford Encyclopedia).

and

Still More Data on the Theft of Ethics Books.

Thanks for visiting!