Beta Geeks Needed

As I may have mentioned, I’ve been in the mood lately to take this site to another level.  I know that many of the regulars here have been very supportive and helped make Shakespeare Geek what it has become. Now I need your help.

I’m looking for a core group of fans of the site who’d be willing to join my contact list ( by email and ideally IM and Skype as well ) and listen to me talk about ideas from time to time. This is not a mass-marketing list and I don’t want hundreds of people on it. This is a personal invitation for the handful or so of dedicated site followers who want to help shape what it becomes.

Here’s what I’m asking:

• Your email address, obviously. Most of what I send will be hand written and not mass-blasted, so you have very little to worry about in the spam department. I can’t promise never to automate, depending on how successful this project is, but I’d hope by now that you trust me enough to know that selling email addresses wouldn’t be one of my business ideas.
• Ideally your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) name, if you have one and want to share it. Sometime conversation works better in real time than over email.
• Speaking of realtime communication, you could also share your Skype contact info if you like to work that way. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to any Shakespeare Geek followers, that’d be fun. Though I never call anybody unsolicited that way, any use of Skype would be strictly after an email or AIM “Hey should we move this to Skype?” dialogue. One excellent advantage to Skype is that you can easily do conference calling, so there’s potential for several geeks to get in on a single conversation. Hard to do that with AIM or Email.
• I only want a small, manageable list – so I will cap this request off at 10 people. If you want in, act fast.
• I will contact you for the purposes of conversation. This is not a mailing list where you can lurk – if I write you and you don’t write me back, I’ll stop writing you.

What you get:

• Early access to any new ideas in development, as they become available. This could include preview copies of books, credentials to web sites…who knows
• Discussion about the business of putting more Shakespeare out in the universe. Note that this is not a group to discuss Shakespeare – that’s what the blog is for. This is to talk very specifically about the “Shakespeare industry”, for lack of a better term – products and services that could revolutionize how we teach it, how we learn it, and how people appreciate and understand it.

Still interested? Excellent. Send me an email with the information above, as well as a brief bio/intro if you think I’d don’t already know you (i.e. are you a parent, a student? Are you in the Shakespeare profession already? That sort of thing.) You may note that I’m not including a link here, and that is on purpose. Not only do I already have enough spam, but I figure you all know my name – duane – and you know what website you’re on, shakespearegeek.com. You need to be able to exhibit at least a little effort :), so go write me an email.