I run Alsnotepad.com.

There I have what is known as a "blog". This is a website where the author can write short "posts", which are displayed on the site in reverse chronological order. I tend to post on substantive philosophical issues, though occasionally I also note other items of academic interest.

Blogs receive a mixed response. Four things to bear in mind regarding blogging are:

(1) Blog posts will never be the standard of published work. They are usually written in a few minutes, and just present some recent issue the author has been thinking about. In this sense, blogs should be read more like one half of a conversation than as something comparable to normal published work.

(2) Relatedly, I call mine my notepad with good reason. The format of a blog is loose enough that they can be used for many very different purposes. Some, including me, use a blog as a rough archive of thoughts, as much for our own reference as anyone else's. Blogging needn't be an exercise in shameless self-promotion.

(3) Blogging doesn't take lots of time unless you decide to do it that way. That is, blogging needn't interfere with "more serious" academic work, unless you let it. I tend to write a five-minute post around three times per week; this is hardly a huge imposition on my normal work.

(4) Indeed, far from blogging interfering with work, it can help. First, it keeps one in practise at writing. But second, new ideas and arguments can be copied and pasted from word into the website very quickly. For very little extra work, one can get decent feedback from kind readers.

So head on over, but read it as it was intended: my notepad that so happens to be public, and not as a publication that happens to be my notepad.