Daily Archives: January 12, 2009

Per Annum

Has it really been one year for the blog? Is it too narcissistic to note, or to celebrate, this? Okay, I’ll be brief. 42,678 hits later (from the US to the Ukraine), here are a few observations, numbers, and comments. Feel free to comment as well (be gentle).

Just a couple of personal favorites:

Discussions generated by these posts:

Gentlemen Prefer Bronze
Little Fish, Little Fish, Swimming in the Water

I liked these discussions the most because I think I learned the most from them. They seem like great models for academic blogging—tight, but with lots of freedom to try interpretations, offer proposals, and get quick and multifarious feedback from casually cordial colleagues (alliteration unintended), in a nice long string of conversation(s) over time. By the way, there is a resurfacing of the Little Fish discussion just up, over at Tang Dynasty Times (Peony’s blog), with some comments about Daodejing 60 from well-published translator, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter).

Discussant:
I want to spread the love around, but one participant deserves special mention, Bill Haines (surprise!), for reasons that should be apparent to anyone who has followed the blog. You can thank the adoring crowd, Bill, and all your handlers, but only until the music starts…

Just a few numbers from the WordPress stat compiler:

These were the top ten posts in numbers of hits:

Summer Project: Chinese Philosophy M.A. 1,658
Little Fish, Little Fish, Swimming in th 920
Question Board 828
APA Newsletter on the State of the Field 670
Shameless Self-Promotion (no longer up) 595
Value of Family in Confucianism 561
Analogical Reasoning — not just ordinar 559
Confucius and Aristotle – book review 536
Shamelessly Brief Book Reviews (no longer up) 504
Wuwei (無為) – What does it mean? 465

I’m not sure what these numbers suggest. The one thing I’m pretty confident of is that some of the “profession” related posts have a lot of hits via Brian Leiter’s Leiterreports blog, which is the mother of all philosophy blogs (Get something linked on that and you’re instantly in the top 10 of WordPress’s “Growing Blogs” list for that day; seriously, it happened twice for this blog). I guess the other thing this tells me is that I should really finish setting up the graduate study information page that I’ve been putting off for the past half year (It’s on my list of New Year resolutions). Also, for those who haven’t been hep to the blog, the two “Shameless…” pages were decommissioned recently for lack of content activity–people just liked to click on them I think because they had catchy page names.

Well, enough belly-button staring for me now; I’ll have a new substantive post up soon. My humble thanks to you all for lurking about and joining in now and then!