I've been thinking for a while about setting up a blog since there're a few arguments I want to make that feel better suited to that format than a forum. Finding time to do it is going to be tricky, but meanwhile I thought I'd seek views on a couple of questions here:

1) Whether it should be a personal blog or a community one. Personally I like the idea of having other people contribute, partly because it reduces pressure on me to keep it 'alive' constantly, partly because it lets me express some of my least popular views with greater anonymity, partly because there's nothing like it. I'd be thinking about having quite a restrictive group of users though - basically people who start from near-identical ethical premises to me (ie scalar hedonistic - global if you like - utilitarians, ideally with similar views to me on metaethics, which I haven't quite found a label I'm happy with for yet) so that it doesn't get bogged down in fundamental disagreement. Perhaps open it to people who're willing to contribute posts that can clearly use that as an assumption for their point, even if they don't necessarily agree entirely with it.

2) What the name should be (this might depend on the answer to 1). I've been running some thoughts past David, and have a couple of faves, but haven't hit any Eureka moments yet:

Normless.com
pros - succinct, catchy, sums up my metaethics.
cons - .com domain will cost me several hundred $s. While that might be worth it for a community blog that takes off, it seems pretty excessive when starting up. Doesn't summarise util views (though not referring directly to the subject matter isn't necessarily a con)

Consequentialist.com
pros - could serve for a wider community if there's not enough of us to keep a blog going otherwise. Simple and to (something resembling) the point. DP owns it I think, so no problem with getting the name
cons - seems a little *too* general, given that I like the idea of having very specific posters. Maybe even to the point of being slightly misleading, esp since according to the lazy definition of consequentialism sometimes rolled out by ethics teachers, expected-utility-focused util isn't necessary a form of consequentialism. Also makes it sound more like a blog about moral philosophy, which I'm not really after. While that might be a prominent part of the content, I think applications will probably be more interesting than theory, and I'm hoping many of the posts won't refer to morality per se.

Apprehending-happiness.com
pros - my current fave. Available to buy cheaply. Play on words (not necessarily a good one) re pursuing happiness. Relates to util but could equally refer to happiness-related science as happiness-related philosophy. Not as concise as the ideas above, but not as flighty as some of the ones below.
cons - using wordplay in headlines and titles is a risky business... it's pretty rare that sounds as good to anyone else as to the person who thought of it, and if people miss the word play altogether it can just sound odd.

Sedgeofhedons.com / Siegeofhedons.com (another slight pun, though not one that I particularly expect anyone to get - sedge and siege are the collective nouns for herons)
Pros - Links it fairly tightly to hedonistic util, since no-one else talks about hedons. Maybe sounds a bit more aesthetic? I can’t really tell. Available to buy cheaply. The choice between sedge/siege gives some room to pick something that sounds more poetic (reminiscent of various continental phil blogs) or something less apologetic. I keep vacillating between which I prefer - sedge a bit pompous, siege a bit aggressive.

hedology.com
Pros - short, fairly descriptive if you can decipher it. Available
Cons - I think the etymology is garbled - they should probably be hedonology/euphorology, both of which sound like a horrific mouthful. Might not mean anything to some people who might actually have been interested.

careless-thought.com (just came up with this while writing. It’s a - presumably obscure - reference to the phrase ‘careless talk costs lives’)
Pros - If you get the reference, it seems quite evocative. An element of self-parody that I like. Available.
Cons - will anyone get the reference? The phrase was used by the UK government during World War II and became a bit of a meme, aided by Douglas Adams’ passage in Hitchhiker’s Guide: http://www.hhgproject.org/entries/carelesstalk.html, but not sure how far outside the UK the meme spread. Checking again, carelessthought.com seems to be taken, but .org is available

That’s all the ideas I’ve come up with that merit a mention. What do people think of them? Anyone feel like brainstorming some alternatives?

I don't think it's worth shelling out a lot of money to buy a domain someone else has.
Buy an unclaimed domain - it costs about $10/year and hosting shouldn't be more than $3/month.
I can help out with some of the technical stuff if you've never done it.
You could narrow down your choices to your favorite 3-5 and post it as a poll.
Try to think of short, easy-to-remember names with no tricky spelling and no dashes (no one likes dashes )

You could ask Seth Baum and James Evans whether felicifia.com can be opened as a group blog. I imagine they'd be obliging.

Also, I'm going to ask you a direct question: if you have something important or itneresting to say about utilitarianism, why not put it on the Wiki?

Polled it up properly.

Ryan - A hint of vanity, but mostly because it might be wrong. I think the Wiki will have more interest to outsiders if it sticks to summaries and reviews of professional, or at least fairly well developed thinking. Sticking up every half-baked thought we have on there is going to make it a mess.

Boris, one option is just to remove the dashes in the double-word titles. It gains functionality but loses a lot of aesthetic appeal. Don't have a strong view on which is the greater good...

Also, short, easy-to-remember, expressive names that aren't already owned are clearly the holy grail, but they're really tough to think of!

How about
"thinkmore.com"
"happynow.com"

Added them in (thinkmore.com is taken, so I've put thinkmore.org).

Was going to add thoughts on pros and cons, but do you want to do that given that they're your ideas?

Argh, apparently editing in options deletes all the current votes on the poll!

util.com (/.co.uk\.org)?

util.com and .org are taken and don't seem to be for sale - David warned me against using anything besides those two endings - I think they're less visible on search engines.

My two cents, FWIW. I would focus on having a clear and memorable USP, or unique selling proposition. So I would say steer away from titles that are opaque puns, like sedgeofhedons, or don't really capture the subject matter, like thinkmore, or are less direct than they could be, like apprehendinghappiness.

Happynow is a good option I think -- simple and more or less on topic. Are there other word pictures you could build using happiness -- thehappinessbox -- thehappinessmachine - happyminds -- happinessfirst -- happinessetc? Or happyology? Pleasurology?

(Also, just a personal preference, but I think urls look much better without hyphens and most bluechip websites avoid them. It's thetimes.co.uk or dailymail.co.uk, not the-times or daily-mail).

Hmm "happiness" sounds too wishy-washy IMO and is probably misleading, making people think of self-help techniques rather than rigorous moral reasoning.

And I agree about having no hyphens.

Yeah I guess it depends on the desired audience. I was assuming you'd want to appeal to a wide general audience, hence simplifying utilitarianism to the pursuit of happiness. If it's going to target specialists, perhaps a subtle allusion is more apt.

By the by -- has anyone set up a Facebook page for discussing u. issues? I'd be delighted to have posts on utilitarian issues pop up in my news feed. Might help spread the word. Maybe I should start another thread for this..

I did create this page, though so far haven't done anything with it.

There's also http://www.facebook.com/pages/Utilitari ... 7575425634

I like Hedology - it's short, sounds like a blog name (and makes me think of the term 'headology' in Discworld, but that's by the by).