OK, so maybe I shouldn’t be sacriligious about this.

But you have to admit, it’s pretty Web 2.0-cool when the Vatican launches its own YouTube channel, and that’s exactly what happened on Friday. Pope Benedict XVI joined President Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II in launching his own channel, the latest effort by the folks in Rome to reach out to the digital generation. (It probably won’t work on my college-age kids, however.)

At a Vatican news conference, an executive of Google Inc., parent company of YouTube, joined with the Catholic clergy to announce that the Vatican had posted its first 12 videos on the pope’s new YouTube channel. The Church hopes to publish three new videos each day.

“This is in particular directed towards the young, but not exclusively,” said Father Federico Lombardi, director of the press office of the Holy See. “This is a step toward better communication. The pope encouraged us to adopt new ways of communication in order to reach out to the people who are interested in the pope’s message.”

Initially, the new YouTube channel will post videos in four languages — Italian, English, German and Spanish — and more languages will be added later.

Way to go, Ben!

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Still, I walked around New York City; Wilmington, NC; and other places I visited during the holidays with a guilty conscience. What about the blog? What about the blog?

Suffice it to say, School Communications 2.0 fell by the wayside while I scrambled through department stores looking for gifts, did the annual Yankee Swap with my work colleagues, decorated the tree, baked pecan pies and red velvet cupcakes, entertained friends and family, drove to North Carolina, and soaked in quality time with my college kids and my extended family.

There were several highlights during this break, a few of them bordering on the surreal:

I joined with the townspeople of Kure Beach, NC, as they gathered together on New Year’s Eve to welcome 2009 with the annual dropping of “the lighted beach ball. ”

I toured a gorgeous home in Wimington that whispered “retirement,” “golf and tennis,” and “quality of life” into my all-too-eager ears.

I wrote a piece about tracking Santa Claus on Google Earth.

I ran out to buy “just one more thing” for my kids at 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and was the only person in the store. Then I walked out empty-handed.

I played Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture with my kids, and came in last.

I did virtually no work for two weeks.

But alas, all good things must end. The vacation is a distant memory already. And I’ve returned to the thinking, working world. My body has, anyway.

So yes, my next post will return to the subject of education and technology — I promise. That is, if my brain hasn’t turned to mush from inactivity.

Google Earth, which I once used to “fly” along the southern Italian coastline with my son, has unveiled the remarkable Google Earth view of Ancient Rome. The three-dimensional simulation painstakingly reconstructs some 7,000 buildings of ancient Rome, including the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Circus Maximus.

The program also hosts a new layer that allows you to see how Rome might have looked in A.D. 320, a city of about 1 million people under Emperor Constantine. Ingenious pop-up windows provide information about all the monuments, and you can “enter” some of the sites, including the Senate and the Colosseum, to study the architecture and marble decorations.

Bernard Frischer, who heads Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, told eSchoolNews that experts worked for about a decade to reconstruct ancient Rome within its 13-mile-long walls. Now Googler Earth Rome can be used for broader educational purposes and Google is sponsoring a competition for U.S. teachers, offering prizes for outstanding curriculum using the new tool. Here’s the video introduction about Google Earth Rome:

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Happy voting. I hope to see you there on Tuesday.

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Google notes that of the people who failed to vote in the last presidential elections, 10 percent said the reason was that they did not know where to cast their ballots. Now, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of Google, there are no more excuses. Think back to 2000 and even 2004, now think about how much the Web is having an impact not only on the presidential election, but in our knowledge of the candidates, the issues and the controversies.

Here’s the quick tutorial Google provides for using Google Vote:

watch?v=QUn0hMIMy5M

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Image via Wikipedia

Imagine my surprise and delight this morning, when the feed that tells me where my blog users come from read: “Kenya.”

Since I’ve had this blog, I have never had a reader from the continent of Africa, much less from Kenya. I’ve been watching my Google Analytics map closely, and I feel so grateful and amazed when I see hits from Europe, India, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea. (I even had to look up a couple of countries.) But for a long time now, the one continent that’s remained dark on my Analytics map has been Africa. Until today.

Coincidentally, I read Webomatik this afternoon, and learned that although Africa is the second largest continent in the world by population, only 5.3% of Africans use the Internet. In contrast, 73 percent of North America’s population uses the Internet.

The good news is that Africa has experienced one of the largest growths in Internet use between 2000 and 2008 — a huge 1,000 percent — and today more than 51 million people are using the Internet in on that continent, according to Internet World Stats.

Still, use of the Web in Africa, a continent of 955 million people, accounts for only 3.5 percent of the world’s Internet use.

Makes you think. Meanwhile, an appreciative shout out to Kenya.

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I especially like this quote from a researcher in the story:

Cara Lane, a researcher who studies learning and scholarly technologies at the University of Washington in Seattle, says all that time spent searching for Hannah Montana videos on YouTube can help make teens better at searching the databases, including Lexis-Nexis and J-Stor, they’ll need for academic research—those IMs, texts, and status updates are a primer for participation in online forums related to classwork. “Students usually arrive not knowing how to use education-oriented technology tools,” Lane says. “But they quickly surpass their instructors in their ability to use them effectively.”

Technorati Tags: businessweek, colleges, universities, technology, youtube, facebook

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I have been a fan of the openness of Web 2.0 — we’re listening to music, watching movies and TV shows, replaying Michael Phelps Olympics videos over and over again. All for free and open to anyone willing to put in the time and energy to click a few times. Everything I’ve read tells me it’s the open source decade, when licenses and copyrights will be a thing of the past. But the former journalist in me is skeptical.

This week, I wrote for another site about the Web 2.0 phenomenon of free books and free magazines online. The old-timer in this area is Project Gutenberg, with its 25,000 free books in its online book catalog. Also out there is the catalog of 30,000 books at the Online Books Page maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, Google Books, and Bibliomania, which has thousands of e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays online, along with message boards about books and authors and lots of reference materials.

Keep in mind that all these forward-thinking sites are prohibited by copyright law from reproducing any books published after 1923, so they all contain classics. But there’s Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and a slew of other recognizable (albeit classic) authors whose works have outlived the copyright laws.

An even more controversial newcomer to the Web 2.0 world is Mygazines, a site that encourages its members to upload their copies of Life, Time, Playboy and many more magazines as PDFs, which are then converted into easily readable “flip book” versions of magazines that anyone can read for free online. This, of course, has sent the publishing world into a tailspin over copyright laws and I’ve read that attorneys are working overtime to shut the place down. But so far, it’s still out there, as you can see from my screenshot. I personally (former journalist that I am) love it.

For those of you who prefer to live within the confines of the law, Zinio offers a long-overdue service. By obviously partnering with the magazine industry, Zinio offers single-issue purchases of magazines online, providing you with immediate access to the issue you wanted to read and saving on paper by letting you read the entire thing online. Awesome. The corner newsstand on your laptop.

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Here’s why: I thought no one was reading my blog because very few people have commented on my posts. Yes, here and there I’ll hear from complete strangers who like my suggestions or who write that they’ll try something I’ve mentioned on the blog. Not one of my friends, colleagues or family members have commented and I’m shy about bothering people with spam emails.

Still, I was curious about whether anyone in the world reads my blog or even opens my blog. So I signed up for Google Analytics to get reports about its use. Egomaniac that I am, I now find myself opening my reports daily. Here’s what I learned just two days after signing up: 93 unique visitors (meaning not me)  had taken a peek at my blog, with the vast majority of them being directed by bookmarking sites or by links elsewhere on the Web. Cool. Of those people, 83% were first-time visitors, which for little old me is awesome.

The best feature of Analytics is the “map overlay”:

This map shows where all my U.S. visitors hail from, with the dark green states representing the largest number of visitors and the lighter green states representing smaller numbers. So naturally, in the U.S., most of my hits came from New York (upper right corner, folks). But I still had a handful of hits from California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and so on. And this is just the U.S. map. I also had folks visiting from nine other countries, including the U.K., India, Slovenia, Singapore, the Netherlands and Canada.

Now, I know that the world’s most popular bloggers and Technorati wunderkinds are chuckling at my measly 93 visits. But that’s OK. Because I’m pleased with my vain, Newbie self.