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Wu-Tang, Peter Gabriel develop Web sites

A trio of musicians as disparate as Wu-Tang Clan, Peter Gabriel and MC Hammer have reincarnated themselves as Web entrepreneurs — with fascinating results.

In the song "Protect Ya Neck," Wu-Tang's RZA raps, "Y'all might just catch me in the park playin' chess, studyin' math." Now you're more likely to catch him on the laptop playin' chess.

RZA, a founding member of Wu-Tang, recently partnered with Chesspark.com to launch http://www.WuChess.com, where the worlds of hip-hop and chess converge. On the site, you can play "hardcore chess" in tournaments with the potential of winning money or "just for the joy of flexin' ya mentals."

It isn't cheap — membership costs $48 a year — but the site also promises to donate a "large part" of revenue to the Hip Hop Chess Federation's scholarship fund. Yes, there is such as thing as the Hip Hop Chess Federation; it even has a tournament, which RZA won last year.

The standard medieval pieces of the board have been updated to Wu-Tang symbols and martial-arts figures. (Method Man would make a good rook, don't you think?) If you join, you can play games against other people, learn from chess masters and watch exhibition matches with Wu-Tang members.

Peter Gabriel, the once lead singer of Genesis whose long solo career included hits like "Shock the Monkey," has also recently debuted a Web site in a field outside his own.

Gabriel is a partner in http://www.TheFilter.com, a site in the increasingly popular realm of "recommendation engines." Its basic principle is to learn about your tastes and then offer recommendations for you based on your input, consuming patterns and supposedly advanced mathematics.

Some $8.5 million of venture capital has been invested in the site by Eden Ventures and Gabriel's Real World Group. The Filter is similar to Pandora.com, the online radio destination that curates song choices from your favorite artist or song.

But the Filter expands to movies as well. If you want it to, it will pull data from sites like Netflix. And if you have a friend on the site, you can mash your profiles to mix tastes. One fun feature allows you to refine the recommendations you receive between "more surprising" and "more expected."

Gabriel, long a musical innovator, is trying to rethink another medium.

MC Hammer has been known less for entrepreneurial spirit than for — in typical "Behind the Music" fashion — mismanaging the spoils of his enormous hits.

Hammer (real name: Stanley Burrell) is co-founder and chief strategy officer of http://www.DanceJam.com, a user-generated bastion for dance videos. Calling itself "the largest dance floor on the planet," DanceJam is a YouTube-like place to watch and upload videos of you and others dancing.

Memorable dance steps were a big part of Hammer's rise to fame with the songs "U Can't Touch This" and "2 Legit 2 Quit." But after the popularity died down, he went bankrupt in 1996, nearly $14 million in debt.

DanceJam may prove to be lucrative for Hammer, who for years has been interested in technology and the Internet. But the site has a lot of steppin' to do to make a dent in the video-sharing market. YouTube remains the Goliath of online video and dancing videos often top its rankings.

The most-viewed video ever on YouTube is, after all, "Evolution of Dance" — the 6-minute clip by Judson Laipply that more than 89 million have watched. The most views any video on DanceJam has accrued: fewer than 8,000.

The advantage DanceJam has is its specialization. By seeing dance steps in action, you can learn just about any move through the site's dance list, from krumping to the robot. You can also challenge others to a battle — a feature that as of yet hasn't drawn a showdown between Justin Timberlake and Usher.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — What's your favorite Web site? E-mail AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle at jcoyle(at)ap.org

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