Howdy! 

God, I love looking at Sitemeter’s visitor stats, especially including the world-wide map with IP locations superimposed as colored dots.

Shoutout to my homies in Andalucia, yo! Not to mention 4 different Australian states (hey, Viv!), New Zealand, and a plucky contingent from Eastern Europe. (I may not know you, but I love you!) I’m strangely thrilled by visitors from England and Western European countries I’ve visited, though I don’t know why. And the search-phrase visitors are cool: “find a date” (? – whatever, man; I feel your pain). The nation-wide response from the good ‘ol US of A is very heartwarming.

Welcome, one and all!

A few special notes:

To you visitors from Raving Atheist – no, I don’t know what he’s talking about either, but welcome aboard and please take a look around. One of us is crazy, and I think you can tell who.

Other click-throughs from other blogs are also most welcome; I’m grateful for your interest and the support of the referring bloggers, in every case. Thanks, welcome, and please stick around.

New York bloggers and visitors: say hello! I’d like to get more hooked into the New York blogging scene, and especially with some of the really great New York ethics/policy bloggers (we all know who they are). Drop me a line! I’m down for meetups or events in Brooklyn or Manhattan especially.

Ethics bloggers: you too! I also want to connect with the professional ethicists/bioethicists online, and would really appreciate input and feedback from that community on what I’m doing (wrong) here and what you think about it. And, of course, substantive comments on the issues in the posts are highly desirable. I’d like to hear from you.

And a plea:

I’ve said it before, but have long since gotten past the point of “too proud to beg”, so I’ll say it again: use the comments section! It’s there for a reason! Now that I’ve got some stats tracking going, I know you’re out there, so say something! (A little link-love wouldn’t hurt neither, though it does hurt to say so out loud.)

I simply don’t know if I’m making a contribution people value. A while back I meta-posted on my plans for focusing and continuing the blog, explaining also why I tend to pursue long-form theoretical discussions rather than breaking-news links and commentary. That’s still largely my conception of this blog. But maybe, like Spinal Tap, I’m filling a much-needed void. Let me know what you think, and if there’s something here you find useful.

Thanks a lot! – especially for visiting and sharing your time and interest here. It’s very gratifying, and I hope we’ll have more opportunities.

UPDATE: Oy! I just discovered that I had my blog e-mail messed up for the last six months, and haven’t seen or responded to any e-mails sent me since about November 2005. Not only that, but the pileup of unseen mail (virtually all of it spam) hit my Inbox quota in January, so I don’t even have any e-mails for the last three months or more. If you’ve written to me directly (using the e-mail link on the sidebar) and I haven’t responded, that’s probably the reason. If you’ve written to me since the middle of January, I never got your e-mail and can’t respond at all. I’m sorry for this.

Certainly no offense was intended – I’m delighted to get e-mail through the blog, and wondered why it had stopped. (The reason is that I let somebody stupid handle the mail function – but when you’re a one-person operation, and the one person is me, that’s the only available option.) Again, I’m sorry – but the problem is now solved. Please keep writing, I’ll be glad to get back to you this time!