I very much appreciate all of you who now regularly read this blog. Several of you have told me that you enjoy reading it and that what I've written here has led to further discussion elsewhere. I've been asked to improve the mechanism for subscribing to the blog which I've now done. You'll see a box in the top right of the page with a box "Subscribe to this Blog". I hope this will make following the blog easier for those of you who use feed readers to keep up with your blog reading.

I've also received requests to turn on commenting. This blog initially had commenting turned on when I started it in October of 2006. However, I started to receive spam-like comments and then decided to turn commenting off. I know that other bloggers have also turned off commenting due to this problem and yet others have taken down their blogs entirely in favor of using such things as newsletters instead. The essential problem appears to be anonymity and too easy access. When people are anonymous, they tend to express different views than when they are not and too easy access to commenting makes it easy to receive spam too. I really believe in blogs being a conversation so have wanted to turn commenting back on for some time. I've now turned commenting back on but you have to sign in with your gmail account to leave a comment. I may be wrong but it seems to me that pretty well everyone has a gmail account. We'll see how this goes. [Additional feedback I've received since this posting proposed that I allow open commenting with moderation which I've now switched the settings to. Thanks for the feedback!]

Please feel free to go back to previous posts in this blog and leave any comments you may have. I do really look forward to hearing from you.