As a fulltime computer geek, I get all my news via “RSS” feeds.  They actually show up on my portable device (iTouch), and many’s the time at 6am on a workday my wife will be watching the news on television while I’m scanning 100x as many stories on my own gadget.  Comes in handy when they say “We’ll tell you what Madonna called her husband, right after this commercial break…” and I can tell her because I just read it 5 minutes ago :). As such, I never bothered with the email newsletter thing.  I figure, if people want to know when I’ve updated the blog, they can get the feed.  But not everybody’s a computer geek, now are they? So, that’s my question.  Were I to open up a good old fashioned email newsletter, would you subscribe?  I couldn’t promise regular intervals (certainly not more than once a week), and for the most part it’d be a summary of stuff that had gone on in the blog anyway, but I could definitely put in original content just for the newsletter, as well as expanded details on previously posted stories. Yes, no?  Help me out here people, it’s too quiet for my liking.  You tell me how we can make this the cool place to hang out and talk Shakespeare.

http://shakespiracy.blogspot.com/ The folks making “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead” are working the viral angle.  They’ve got some videos up, if you’re into the whole vampire thing.

Twice over the past few weeks, publishers have asked if I run contests and if I want free stuff to giveaway.  My first response is “Of course I want free stuff to give away,” but I don’t want to keep doing the “Link to me someplace” thing, either . That gets boring. If anybody’s got some contest ideas they’ve seen on other blogs, that they’d participate in (and think others would, too!), I’m all ears.  Who knows, maybe that’ll be my first contest — best contest idea gets a book :).

http://blog.figmentengine.com/2008/10/hamlet-using-markov-chain.html You probably have to be pretty heavy on the computer-geek side of geeky to appreciate this, but luckily, I am :).  “Markov chains” are a way to statistically look at a data set and then try to reproduce likely combinations of the elements that could have matched the similar pattern.  It’s also useful for doing things like name generation. Here, the programmer starts with the text to Hamlet and then rearranges it jigsaw puzzle style to see what comes out.  Most of it is nonsense, but if you know how to spot the seemingly random bits from the “wow he almost got it” bits, it’s fun stuff.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/10/07/one_killed_three_injured_in_shootings/ The headline is horrible – but the post is actually an aggregate of brief local news stories, including the “Shakespeare And Pie Club” at Hampshire College.  Hey, whatever gets ’em in the door!