A question to my readers

Early January is by tradition a time of soul searching, reflection and dieting. I am also about to move from Brisbane to Sydney, and take up a new direction, and I was wondering about the use of this blog.

I’ve been blogging now since February of 2007, first at Blogspot, the at Scienceblogs and now here. In that time I have blogged around 3500 posts, which is a fair bit of writing. But I have found that not many people link to me if any, nobody awards me any awards, and my traffic is stable at around 600 readers a day. Clearly I am not setting the world on fire. I’m no Bora Zivkovic.

I didn’t intend to be. Instead I blogged just to get ideas out there, and to get what feedback I could. However, either my profession is not all that inclined to read blogs, or they simply do not like this one, because I rarely get feedback from professional philosophers, let alone philosophers of biology. It’s clear to me they don’t read it.

So as a professional tool, Evolving Thoughts is not successful. It doesn’t even get linked to in the blogrolls of other philosophers or philosophy group blogs. No link love…

Perhaps as an outreach tool? I try to make philosophical issues of biology relevant to a wider audience, but like I say, readership rarely changes unless I say something nasty about religious views. Such cheap readership rises do not translate into long term readers either. So I cannot say that it is a good tool for that purpose either.

The link posts I used to do are now covered by Twitter, which is more immediate and easier.

I sometimes draft work in progress here for comment, and often I have had good feedback, but from historians and scientists, not philosophers, and they tend to be the usual suspects, like Thony Christie (who did get an award for his blog). I don’t find that non-regulars comment.

Now I have an ego of the usual size for a philosopher, which is to say that it needs Extra Large undies. But given the enormous effort it takes to do this blog, I have to ask: is it worth it? Is my writing so opaque and boring, and are my topics so esoteric and technical, that I should not do this except very rarely? I don’t know. I don’t want just to be an ego.

I put it to you guys; seriously, should I continue to do this, or instead concentrate on publishing? I can still post via Whewell’s Ghost occasionally. Or is there something I can do to get into the conference speaker circuit and make millions like PZ?

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