When Nature Calls, Turn to Web 2.0

There’s something for everyone on social media these days, and two websites — Sit or Squat and MizPee — prove that.

Sit or Squat is a relatively new Web 2.0 site that seriously lives up to its name. When you sign up, the site provides you with a map of all the rest rooms nearby where you can relieve yourself. The Sit or Squat reference? That’s meant for anyone who wants to know whether you’d be safer to sit or squat once there.

On a recent visit to Sit or Squat, I was furnished with an interactive map of White Plains, NY, where I live. I was able to quickly determine that all the major department stores near me — Target, Walmart, Fortunoff, Bloomingdales and more — had rest rooms. Nothing new there. But users also tell you what the conditions are like in those rest rooms.

When I clicked on WalMart, here’s what one reader warned: “YUCK! DISGUSTING! GO ACROSS THE STREET TO TARGET.”

Another reader, who has obviously used the facilities at the nearby Fortunoff department store, made my search easier by noting: “On 3rd floor, near ATM and water fountain.”

I was also able to view the photo taken by the user of a lonely portajohn located somewhere on South Lexington Avenue in downtown White Plains. (See photo at the top of this post.) That contributor also called it the “Blue Box o’ Mercy.” As would be expected, that particular spot was stamped with a big “Squat.”

You can also download Sit or Squat to your iPhone or Blackberry, so you can use it when you are traveling and really have to go. It functions worldwide and is based on Google Maps, and anyone can submit their favorite, or least favorite, “throne” to the site.

MizPee is a simple text service that finds the closest (and supposedly cleanest) toilet near you.Using your cell phone, you simply send a text message of your location (city and state) to the number 415-350-2290. MizPee will send you information about the nearest rest rooms, which includes a rating system for cleanliness and information about whether you need to be a paying customer at the location before using the loo.

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Top of the ‘Net

I hope to provide you with “Top of the ‘Net” every weekend, which will usually be a list of not-to-be-missed web discoveries. Tune in!

Just when you think the Internet is saturated and things can’t get any more interesting, you discover new sites and blogs that just blow you away. I love to stumble across sites that make me ask: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Three such sites come to mind, each one notable for its creativity. You must check these out:

1. One of my favorite blogs is Cake Wrecks, a clever blogspot blog that’s been around for just over a year and is “eating up” the competition on Google page ranks. Here’s the tag line for this blog: When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong. This is a hilarious site, create by Jen Yates, that feeds off the submissions of whacky looking cakes that readers have either made, ordered or received. Among other things, this site, and the others I list here, are successful because the owners write well. Look for great captions and subtitles. Here’s a sample cake photo from Cake Wrecks:

The title above this entry (which included a seriously long menu of “horse” cakes) was: Why beat a dead horse…when you can eat one?

Yates has written a book, naturally, and is selling a variety of T-shirts, affectionately called “Wreckwear.” Her contributors and fans (legions of them) are called Wreckies.

Now why didn’t I think of that?

2. Again, a site that lives and breathes based on the contributions of others: AwkwardFamily Photos. This one, which was featured on The Today Show last week, was also passed along by my work colleague, John Resanovich, who is always sending me cool sites. Warning: Before you go on AwkwardFamilyPhotos, take a bathroom break. Otherwise, you’ll have an accident from laughing so hard. These are some of the most hilarious photos you could imagine.

Here are a couple of samples from Awkward, also notable for its spot-on captions and subtitles.

This one is titled: Joy Ride

And this one is called Mommy-the-Pooh:

3. Finally, I must introduce you to Good Magazine’s examination of a series of photos of the insides of people’s refrigerators. They were produced by photographer Mark Menjivar, and collectively make a fascinating statement about what our refrigerators say about us. For example:

Here’s what the caption says:
Carpenter/Photographer | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household | 12-Point Buck | 2008

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Immaculate Reception — Vatican Goes Video

VATICAN CITY, VATICAN - JANUARY 08: Pope Bene...Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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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Visit Ancient Rome via Google Earth

Ah, Google Earth. One of my favorite distractions, along with Trio, a little game I installed on my iGoogle page.

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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Thinking of Not Voting? Google Says Think Again.

OK, so while I sift through the dozens of Obama emails I’ve received today asking for my help calling voters in one last push, Google has done another great video meant to encourage anyone out there who still might be apathetic about voting (could there be people like this?) to get out there and pull the lever in the most exciting landmark election I can remember.
Again, they’ve called on well-known faces (and some apparent help from Steven Spielberg) to make a fun, well-paced video that’s the sequel to the “Don’t Vote” video released earlier. Check out the latest installment here, and tell me that Sacha Baron Cohen doesn’t crack you up:

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

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Don’t Know Where to Vote? Ask Google

While working on a Hubpages article tonight called “10 Ways to Protect Your Vote,” I stumbled across Google Vote, the latest foray by Google into making our lives easier.  The site allows anyone with the basic questions about voting — who, what, when and where — can discover the answers to their questions with this handy little tool.

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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Textbooks and iPods and Facebook — Oh My!

This Special Report in Businessweek this week takes a fascinating look at how technology — from iPods to professors’ Facebook pages — is changing the face of your average campus.

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.”

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Google Analytics Makes Me Happy

OK, so I’m a newbie, a Web adolescent. A rookie. A mere child of the blogosphere. But hey — since I hooked my blog up with Google Analytics, I’m as inspired as ever to continue blogging for school PR professionals and school leaders who want to learn more about Web 2.0.

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.

Using Google Docs

We have been using Google Docs in my office recently, particularly because my staff and I all write a gazillion profiles of individuals retiring from our organization, in preparation for our annual Retirement Reception. It’s a great tool because it keeps me up-to-date on everyone’s progress, and permits me to easily go in at any time to edit or write profiles. My secretary, the hard-working and intelligent Doreen, also can keep track.
Creating and storing your documents (this includes docs that work and look just like MS Word, Powerpoint and Excel files) on Google Docs means they’re stored online. That also means they can’t be deleted from your hard drive and that you can open them from any computer. No more flash drives, CDs for storage, or losing all your documents when you get a computer virus or when your computer goes kaput. Everything in Google Docs is secure and password-protected, but you also can invite “collaborators” (people who can edit and open your documents) or “viewers” (those who can only read them).
Here’s what Melinda Miller of Willard, Mo., an elementary school principal and author of The Principal Blog, says about her use of Google Docs:

* I started downloading everything that came as an attachment into google docs first and then save it also in whatever file I needed to. Other principals in my district and I send official documents back and forth for editing but they haven’t bought into google docs yet.
* PTO Notes – I type up monthly PTO notes for my PTO meetings regardless of whether I can be there or not. Instead of posting these in the teachers lounge or making a copy for each teacher, I “publish” the notes and then send a link to the teachers to read. I could still post one copy in the work room but I forget.
* End of the year checklist – Instead of giving all the teachers a copy of the end of the year checklist to lose, I just downloaded it to google docs, “published” it, and then sent them a link. I really just want them to have a copy to refer to and then I will give them a final copy but this is better than copying a lot of times. They can just refer to it until closer to the end of the year.
* End of year info – The end of the year comes at us so fast that I thought I would also type up some “helpful info” and send it as a document as well. This one is a work in progress and I told them that I would be adding to it and not to make a bunch of copies but to just save the link and refer back to it. (I don’t think they have even explored delicious yet.)

Try using Google Docs. Go to docs.google.com and open a free account and just start. It’s worth it and I can almost guarantee that it will save your sanity. Once you’ve mastered using it, sign up your colleagues. It’s an efficient way to share and communicate. If you’re still a bit reluctant, take the Google Docs tour first.

Write, Create, and Collaborate Online

If you’re still attaching Word documents to emails, sending them back and forth between you and the superintendent, business official or principals you represent, you’re bogged down in emails and attachments. And which version is the right one? With online writing and collaborating software like Google Docs and Writewith, you can work collaboratively on any document from any computer. You can simply go into your mutual Google Docs folder and work. And most online software applications permit you both to see and track any revisions. The best way to illustrate how Google Docs works is with this video from the clever folks at Commoncraft.com:

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