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.

Every year, the Edge Foundation poses a question to some of the world’s top minds. This year, the question was: “What are you optimistic about?” See what leading thinkers had to say and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section below.

I’ll go first. I am optimistic about the long-term potential that the Internet has in breaking down all kinds of barriers, but particularly those of class. For a very long time now, all mass media has come from wealth and power, and people just accepted that because there had never been any other way. But the Internet makes possible the creation of networks between people, and the construction of meaning from a variety of perspectives. Even in the infancy of the World Wide Web, we’ve seen such user-driven communication tools as message boards, peer-to-peer file sharing, weblogging, podcasting, video posting, and social networking websites. As the current generation of technology-savvy children become the developers and thinkers of the adult world, society itself will be reshaped in the image of this most democratic medium.

I’m not filing this under Predictions. As I said, I’m particularly optimistic about this one.

What are you optimistic about?