Happy birthday

This blog started one year ago today. Blogging has actually been a more rewarding experience than I expected, mostly because it's put me in contact with smart and interesting folks (in both cyberspace and meatspace) that I otherwise would not have met. It's repeatedly been extremely helpful to hear other people's reactions to what's bouncing around inside my head.

I'm not sure what the future holds for Obscure and Confused Ideas. On the one hand, I start my first academic job in just under 2 months, and everyone tells me that the first year is pretty brutal -- so if anything is squeezed out by time pressures, it might be blogging. On the other hand, it'll be the first time in seven years that I won't be surrounded by 30 or so other people interested in history and philosophy of science, so I may have to bounce my ideas off the online community instead of my current offline community. We'll see.

Just so this post contains something other than insufferable self-absorption, I'm linking to a Colloquium Bingo game card, produced by the grad students at Johns Hopkins's Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. And one other thing: I was looking over the Experimental Philosophy blog again recently, and was filled with a mixture of admiration and envy -- for it looks to an outsider like me that they really have a genuine online research community there. People post new papers-in-progress, which are given careful and serious feedback my several people, and the authors engage in a substantive conversation about their work. It appears to be a model of what people wish the web would do -- link up people, in a real and almost intimate way, separated by thousands of miles. I wonder why Experimental Philosophy has succeeded here, while other blogs with the same basic idea (for example, Philosophy of Biology, which has apparently disappeared) have not done as well.