In a recent article in The Philosophers' Magazine (1st quarter 2007, no.37, p.12-14) Ophelia Benson (recently interviewed for Virtual Philosopher), opens up with the question of whether weblogs are somehow incompatible with 'the rigour, discipline, and seriousness of real, grown-up philosophy?' To me this is a bit like asking whether ink on paper is compatible with philosophy - apart from Socrates, most philosophers have agreed that it is. I suspect in the next few years most philosophers will also recognise that blogs provide a good place to do philosophy and to communicate with anyone who might be interested in it.
I suspect Ophelia's opening angle was a reaction to her editor's parody blog that she mentions where he remarks 'Blogging would waste my time and yours. Go read something I or someone else has put some prolonged thought into.' Apart from the informal fallacy of assuming that more prolonged thought = better results (the Protestant Work Ethic Fallacy?), this seems confused. As I've mentioned in a previous post, one of the best ways of conceptualising blogs is as published commonplace books. Once you see them that way, anything goes - including philosophy of any kind. For an example of a philosopher doing philosophy on a blog, see Stephen Law's new blog with his ongoing discussions about relativism: the medium allows musings, links to articles, comments, responses to comments, and revisions...philosophy in action. Add to that the possibility of delivering files in all formats, images, and MP3s or webcasts...and it is hard to see why anyone might think that blogs are intrinsically incompatible with any content whatsoever. You could put a digital book as a downloadable file on one if you wanted.
I stand by what I said for her article about how they can also trigger new ideas:
'Instant publication of drafts of ideas can be stimulating: archiving of articles can be useful. I like blogs which give you leads to other interesting things on the same topic - so reading blogs can stimulate you to thoughts you might not otherwise have had and resources (and even people) you didn't know existed. What is great about a blog is that you can link up all kinds of things that might otherwise not be noticed.'
There's more on this topic from Richard Chappell here - not sure I completely agree with him though. He seems to ignore the fact that blogs can deliver book-length file, article-length files, paragraphs as posts, or aphorisms (not to mention audio and video clips) and that there is nothing about the medium that condemns it to be transient or brief.
is how I got started. It is clear and to the point and very practical. Wibbels doesn't take anything for granted. This is book is a model of clarity. I followed his recommendation to use a 