Is Squidoo the next big thing? Created by Seth Godin with the premise that “everybody is an expert in something”, Squidoo attempts to take all the best elements of the Web2.0 world (RSS, blogs, flickr, tags, etc…) and wrap it all in a user friendly, build-it-up-from-pieces way so that anybody with a desire to make a place for information on topic X can do so.

I know that most blog approaches, like this one I’m using, are limited in the “and what else can it do?” sense. For instance, if I find another RSS feed that I might want to include here, can I do it? I have yet to figure it out. And if I want to add some Links to a section on other Shakespeare sites, I have to go edit and publish the template by hand. Nasty. With Squidoo, everything is build into the dynamic GUI where you drag and drop sections around the page.

Naturally I’ve already hooked myself up: ShakespeareStuff. Tell me if you like it. Where would you normally visit – there (where they have an RSS feed back to here), or here? Why?

Technorati Tags: business, idea, squidoo, RSS, Shakespeare, startup

Music of Shakespeare’s Plays, New CD by Ensemble Chaconne:

Don’t know anything about it, but people were interested last time I had a story about the music of Shakespeare.

Among the many selections are “Willow, Willow” sung by Desdemona before her murder in Othello; “It Was a Lover and His Lass” (As You Like It); “O Mistress Mine” (Twelfth Night); “Hark, Hark! The Lark” (Cymbeline); “Take O Take Those Lips Away” (Measure for Measure); “Full Fathom Five” (The Tempest), “Go from My Window” from Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet; and “Greensleeves,” Shakespeare’s best-known ballad tune (quoted in The Merry Wives of Windsor), an allusion to women of ill repute, recognized by their green sleeves.
I’m curious about the Ophelia song. I wrote the beginning of a play once that I called “Ophelia’s Song”. The idea was that, like R&G Are Dead, it focused on the scenes between the scenes, what Ophelia was up to when she wasn’t on stage. The story was that she and Hamlet definitely had a relationship going, and he’d convinced her that he was just “playing” mad. I like that scene where she enters and gives the flowers to everybody. It might be the most tragic bit in the whole play, short of Hamlet’s final deathbed speech. Especially if there was a little more meat there to work with. Shakespeare didn’t really give her much depth.

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

I stumbled upon ThinkExist today, so of course I punched up Shakespeare like I always do. I got a bunch of other people’s quotes talking about Shakespeare, which is actually kind of cool:

“If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded…, it was Shakespeare’s mind.”
– Virginia Woolf

“Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place; if we do not understand him, it is our own fault.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“If you locked Shakespeare in a room with a typewriter for long enough, eventually he’d write all the songs by the Monkees.”

“After God, Shakespeare has created most.”
– Alexandre Dumas Pere

“The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life : Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!”
– Robert Browning

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare

Scene : Jack is over the apartment reading a script that Will has written. Jack has just discovered, to his shock, that “there are lezzies in this.”

Jack: Will, I beg of you, please let them be played by men. No one will know the difference. That’s what Shakespeare did when he had lesbos in his scripts.

Will: Yes, who could forget the coven of high school gym teachers in Macbeth?

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare, television

So after finding that Shakespeare reference and being at google anyway I went looking for more Shakespeare Simpsons references. Ending up at www.simpsons.com I typed “shakespeare” into the search and, while I did not get any interesting hits, I did notice that the search engine is Prospero Technology.

That’s just weird.

Technorati Tags: television