I link, therefore I am.

Descartes notwithstanding, proof of existence in the blogosphere is not provided by who you link to, but who links to you. I now have my first incoming link, which according to Technorati boosts my rating from the 2.4 million range into the 1.6 million range. So Shakespeare Teacher is now one of the top 2 million blogs in the world. I will be signing autographs in the lobby after the post.

So, who linked to me? It was Stick Figure Hamlet Guy. I linked to him, and he linked back to me. And now I jumped up 800,000 places in Technorati. I’m starting to understand how this works.

I don’t know why the link from Such Shakespeare Stuff didn’t register on Technorati. Why, with two links, who knows? I might have cracked the top million! Well, I can still dream. And thanks for the link, Stick Figure Hamlet Guy!

Your move, Latte Foam Artist Guy.

Well, this is exciting for me. It’s my first link from someone I don’t know personally. It’s from Such Shakespeare Stuff, a blog dedicated entirely to Shakespeare:

Link for ShakespeareTeacher.com because I like the domain and hope to hear good things from him. It doesn’t appear to be a blog devoted to Shakespeare, though, so it should be interesting to see how much relevant content we get.

This blog isn’t exclusively about Shakespeare, no. Instead, it is approached with the philosophy that a love of Shakespeare is only the beginning of a life of examination and discovery. This is a blog that documents that journey, and tries to have some fun along the way. The title, I think, has more to do with the author than with the intended audience at the moment.

Having said that, I would have expected to be blogging more on Shakespeare than I have been so far. I only just started this blog, and I seem to be writing more about Genghis Khan, the new Congress, and about blogging itself than I am about Shakespeare. Still, you can expect to see a lot more relevant content here in the coming months than there is now. Also, this domain may eventually house more than just the blog, but perhaps I’ve said too much already.

So, thanks to SSS for the link. And for those of you who came to this site by other means and were looking for a Shakespeare-only site, you can quell your disappointment by visiting Such Shakespeare Stuff, where you will find plenty of Shakespeare-related content and commentary. I expect to become a regular visitor myself.

I’m learning something new about blogging every day! My last post quoted an article from The Onion that mentioned Vanderbilt University. Next thing I know, there’s a trackback from Vanderbilt. It must be some kind of spider searching the blogs for the school’s name and automatically linking to it. The University of Texas trackback was probably the same thing. I wonder if other schools have that. Like, say, Stanford University. Or the University of Notre Dame. Or New York University. Or the Ohio State University. Or the University of California Los Angeles. Or Northwestern University. Or the University of Wisconsin Madison. Or Arizona State University. Or the University of Pennsylvania. Or the Pennsylvania State University, better known as Penn State. Yes, I do wonder…

Well, there are better ways to get linked up. I just registered this blog with Technorati, an online blog directory. Shakespeare Teacher is currently ranked 2,431,865 out of all of the Technorati blogs. I don’t think they make giant foam hands with that many fingers, but hey, I’m just getting started. However, if you do a search for Genghis Khan Theme Park, my blog comes up second only to a re-posting of the article I was originally citing. So, who’s obscure now?

I tried to access the blog from a Department of Education site yesterday, but it wouldn’t load in fully. The filter said that the page had exceeded the number of “questionable words.” Now, I think I do a pretty good job of keeping it clean here. Any thoughts on what words or phrases in my first week of posts might have given the filter pause?

Now, this is strange. After my last post, Maps of War, both my cousin’s blog and the University of Texas picked up that I had linked to them, and they both linked back to my post. I didn’t know they could do that!

So now that I’ve been outed as a blogger, I guess the time has come to go public. And I think there’s enough content here now that I can start inviting a small group of people to come and visit. If you’re one of these people, then this may be the first post you’re reading. Welcome to my blog!

What would be an appropriate introduction to Shakespeare Teacher? How about an article from The Onion that gives the site a name check?

Theater Major Has Too Long Borne Shakespeare Teacher’s Blunt Upbraidings, Bitter Scoffs

November 20, 2006 | Issue 42-47

NASHVILLE, TN-Vanderbilt University theater major Sandy Heckscher said Monday that she has been stretched to the limits of her endurance by the “blunt upbraidings and bitter scoffs” of drama professor and Shakespeare scholar Ian Treatt. “Who breathes but’d rather be a simple whore, than lurk within this country of insult?” said Heckscher, who thinks Treatt is a “bad grader.” “O monstrous beast! How like a swine he lies! Grim death – that foul and loathsome moniker!” Treatt responded to the charges by saying only that he found himself amazed that theater majors “are too simple/To offer war where they should kneel for peace.”

Enjoy the rest of the blog, and if you find a post or two that speaks to you, feel free to speak back and leave a comment behind, so I’ll know you’ve been here.

I gave a full-day workshop today on the value of blogging in the literacy classroom for school-based literacy coaches and technology coaches from across the city, and I never once mentioned that I had my own blog. I don’t want to be annoying “Hey, you gotta read my blog” guy.

But if I never tell anyone about the blog, then who will come and watch my postings of grainy Animaniacs cartoons from the mid-’90’s?

This is my first blog entry. Today is the first day of a new year, a day when we can imagine the future and all of its possibilities stretched out before us. Starting a new blog is kind of like that. Thanks for reading this, and maybe I’ll be back.