New Feature in Google Maps

I’m wondering if this is really a new feature, or if I’ve just been oblivious to it for a while.  I was Google mapping something today, when the “suggested routes” caught my eye…because, while I’ve been used to dragging the path line around to try out different routes, I’d never seen them already laid out for you.  Pretty cool!

While it’s not perfect, it’s certainly a start to finding alternate routes.

Added bonus: instead of having to click the link to see the alternate route, you can simply hover your mouse over it and see how it matches up with the route you have displayed on screen:

Tell your schools to show President Obama’s address!

Friends, I am not normally a send it out to the world kind of person, but this issue is pressing, and it is important, and while I mainly use this blog to reflect on work, I feel that this is important enough to risk backlash at work by posting here.

As you may be aware, President Obama is going to address the nation’s school children at noon eastern time on Tuesday, September 8, 2009.  His message will be to encourage the children of this great country of ours to do well in school.  No partisanship, no talk of health care or of the other topics that are currently in debate around our country.

You may not know, however, that there is a movement underway to derail this message.  There is a small, but vocal group that is petitioning school districts to not show the president’s address.  My school district received dozens of phone calls and emails today with parents threatening to pull their children out of school on September 8 and trying to bully the school district into not showing the address.  We have heard talks of the president “brainwashing” students and using his position to promote his political agenda.

As usual, the lies and misinformation spread by those wishing to derail the president’s address are leading to panic and confusion.  This was obviously an orchestrated event, since the wording on several emails was very similar and the phone calls and emails all started around the same time late this morning.

Please do not let the loud voices of a vocal minority take over the education of your child.  Please let your voice be heard.  Call and email your child’s schools and let them know that the president encouraging your children to do well in school is a message you want your child to hear.  Do not let fear and hate win out in this.  Call and email your schools and the district office every day until September 8 and let them know what an important and historical event this will be, and that you do not want your child to miss out on it.  Do not take no for an answer.  Please pass this along to as many people as you can, and do it fast!

Here is what being the child of a geek gets you…

Sorry, folks…I know the posting has been non existent lately.  I have taken on the job of district webmaster, and launching our new district web site, and that, along with adding a new child to our family has taken the wind out of my blogging sails.

Anyway, I snapped this picture last week of my daughter testing out an M & A Companion PC (read: netbook designed for kids).   I brought it home so that my wife could actually use her laptop again.  At 3 years old, she’s already better on a laptop than most adults I know!

Moving them along…

Today, one of our APs interviewed a candidate in Germany via Skype.

We’re getting there.

Reflections on our district jumping into social media

Over the last couple of weeks, our district jumped feet first into distributing as much information as we could in as many ways as we could.

I wonder how long it would have taken us if we hadn’t had the H1N1 emergency.

The one thing I love about working in this school district is how progressive and forward thinking we are. I also love that we’re small enough that someone like me can ask a question, and get an answer, get permission to do something the same day.

It helps to have people in key positions who trust their employees and people in key positions who are young enough to get it and old enough to know not to embarrass anyone.

I’ve been quietly collecting information about web 2.0 tools for a long time, and when the opportunity presented itself, I opened up my arsenal and started asking questions.  Can we start a Twitter account?  How do you feel about streaming press briefings live over the Internet?  Podcasts?  Sure, I’d be happy to help edit and post them!

So when I last wrote about it, I mentioned that we had about 30 people watching the Wednesday press briefing. All afternoon and evening Wednesday, I thought about how to improve the quality of audio and video that we provided. When I first tried out UStream, I tested it on a beautiful, 24″ iMac that we have sitting in our office, and one of the things I noticed was that it listed “DV Video” as one of the options.  Thursday morning, I came up to the office early and ran to get one of the DV cams that we used to stream graduation, and hooked it up to the Mac.  It worked beautifully!

I unplugged the Mac and dragged it up to the board room, where the press briefing would take place.  I had been thinking about using a different computer anyway, since the laptop I was on Wednesday was slow and I was having a hard time keeping up with Twitter during the press briefing.  The Mac, with it’s huge screen and 3 GHz processor would allow me to seriously multi-task while the press briefing was going on.

I got it all hooked up, and started streaming just to test it out.  The browser crashed on me a few times, and I started looking at what was different from when I had used it in our office.  The only thing I could see was that I had my mail client open, so I closed it, restarted the browser, and everything started working.  Whew.  Problem averted.

I also embedded the live stream on the district home page every day we did it.  What I didn’t expect was that the number of people watching would grow exponentially every day as word got out, and as people got anxious about whether we would actually open on May 4 as originally planned.

On Wednesday, we had less then 50 people watching.  I think 30 at any given time. Then Thursday, we had over 300 watching simultaneously, and the questions came pouring in from Twitter.  However, I found out later that a lot of the questions were coming from the “social stream” chat on UStream, and some of the people asking questions weren’t even following us on Twitter.  I fixed that on Friday by removing the social stream chat from the UStream page, just leaving the chat room open.

With a larger computer and a better camera setup, I gained a lot of attention from the journalists in the room on Thursday, which I did not expect or really want.  But when the superintendent mentioned what we were doing and how we were doing it, I found three camera pointed at me and reporters asking me questions while the cameras were rolling.  I was glad I had shaved. That evening, I found myself on two of the local new stations, even getting a little sound bite on the Fox affiliate.  I was giddy. Little did I know what a nightmare Friday would be.

Friday, we had the same setup, and the anticipation was that the Superintendent would inform everyone whether we were going to open school Monday, May 4, since all of the other districts in the county had closed through May 11. I knew that we’d have at least as many people watching as Thursday, but I had no idea what I was in store for.

When I fired up the Mac on Friday and tried broadcasting, I couldn’t get the browser to stop crashing.  I didn’t have the mail client open, and I couldn’t understand what was happening.  I searched frantically for a solution before the 1 PM briefing, but couldn’t find anything.  Finally a few minutes before 1, I got it to broadcast and record without crashing for about 5 minutes, and I thought everything was stable.

Less than 5 minutes into the briefing, it crashed again.  We had over 1000 people watching our stream and I knew I had to go to plan B and fast!

I spun the Mac around and started broadcasting using the built in iSight camera, and the built in microphone.  Unfortunately, the superintendent had set up about 5-7 feet away from where the computer was, and the journalists had surrounded her, not leaving a very clear path for the camera.  That, combined with bad acoustics in the room and the distance the mic was from her, made for a very poor presentation that was hard to hear.  On top of all of that, she did not have any information about whether school would reopen on Monday, and I had an angry, albeit virtual, mob on my hands.

Tweets were flying everywhere about how we hadn’t provided the information we’d “promised” or how bad the press briefing looked.  I took a lot of that personally, since I was the one hadling the tech side of things.  However, I also knew that technical difficulties happen and I did my best to rectify the situation. I also knew that we coulnd’t put out information that we didn’t have, and at the time, we just did not have word either way about what to do.

Our web site took a beating.  Our average number of hits per day during a normal week when school is in session is about 2500.  That’s with browsers all over the district pulling up the district home page.  As you can see below, during the first week, the number of hits on our web site were over 10,000 almost every day, and the largest single day total we had was over 31,000 on Friday, May 1.  The web site never went down under all of the stress, and that was great.

We know now that it can handle thousands of simultaneous hits.  We transferred over 200 gigs of information just in that week alone, and if we’d actually been hosting the video feed, I’m sure it would have been in the thousands of gigs.

The other web 2.0 thing we did was podcasting.  The superintendent had done a podcast before, but not on a consistent basis.  But every evening during the “flu-cation,” the superintendent would email me her podcast audio, which I would edit and post to the district home page, then tweet that it was up. She mentioned late in the week how it was interesting that she would say something in her podcast one evening, then hear a response about it from higher-ups in the state the next day.  NPR even asked for an interview with her based on listening to her podcasts!

I learned an awful lot about 24/7 connection during the swine flu outbreak. There were lots of times where I had to bite my tongue and not type some snippy response to someone on Twitter, or in the chat room on UStream when our feed crashed and burned during the Friday press briefing. I knew to have a backup plan, but I had no idea that the backup plan needed to be as good, or better, than plan A. I had no idea that people could be so ungrateful. We did not have to do all of the things we did. Most of the school districts in our area didn’t have a fraction of the information that we put out, and yet, there were people who moaned and groaned when a piece of our information wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear, or didn’t work perfectly.

To be fair, though, there were a great number of people who sent us emails and tweets of encouragement, and told us that we were doing a great job. Those are what kept me going through the week.

I’m hoping that everything we started over these past few weeks will continue.  Streaming events in our district, like board meetings, is something that can help the public gain information even if they can’t attend.  The superintendent podcasting is a great way for her to give information to our community about everything good that’s going on in our schools.  Our twitter account is another way for the public to get information quickly, and I’ve been updating it as we continue to reschedule things.  Next week, I’ll be turning it over to our Public Info Officer, and we’ll split duties on updating it.

I certainly didn’t start this endeavour to gain attention for myself.  I really just wanted to help the district distribute information as quickly and efficiently as possible.  I hope that I can continue to be part of the driving force behind this district being progressive, and using social media tools to spread the word about what we’re doing.

It helps to have people in charge who trust you to make decisions and be competent.  It’s challenging, but it’s a challenge I’m looking forward to continuing.

Twitter – a follow up

You’ll recall that a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about what marketing execs don’t get about Twitter. Seems I may have jumped the gun a bit.

It’s looking now like Pizza Hut’s foray into the Twitterverse is probably a really good thing for their image. Given what happened with Domino’s video going viral, and Domino’s lack of response online about it, I can understand how a company would want to have an online presence if for nothing more than damage control.

Managing what is said about you online is important whether you’re an individual or a corporation, and maybe I was a little quick to judge just how important it is for a company to have an online presence and use it to not only communicate with customers, but also to bolster the company’s image.

Will Richardson uses a good example in his presentations (and I wish I had links to this, but I don’t…maybe Will can help me out?) of a woman who tweeted about the lack of response she was getting from Allstate. A couple of hours later, she had a response on Twitter from Allstate, and a week later, her issue was resolved.

If only every company was so quick to manage their online image.

I’ve been trying to manage the online image of our district by keeping up with the district’s wikipedia page, and asking about starting the Twitter account during the whole swine flu thing.

Like so many people are saying, managing your digital footprint, or digital identity is how people are going to preceive you these days. By failing to manage your presence online, you are allowing others to say what they will about you, or your company. By refusing to participate in the conversation, you are allowing others to form the public’s opinion of you.

So, I apologize for being quick to jump on Pizza Hut and being skeptical about what they are doing. They’re one of a handful of companies who actually seem to be getting the point. A point that I did not fully understand myself until two weeks ago.

And, as a side note, it’s funny that I was listening in to Will Richardson’s presentation at TEC SIG on Thruday because late Thursday/early Friday, my wife’s car caught fire, and we tried desperately to get it removed from our driveway all weekend without any help from our insurance agency. I tweeted about it, put it on my Facebook, and even wrote on my personal blog about it.

And I never heard a word about it. Never heard anything from the car manufacturer, either, and I thought they were a progressive company.

I wonder how long it will be before the old school companies realize that the new name of the game is participate in the discussion, watch what people are saying about you, or go the way of the dinosaurs.

Accountability has gone right out the window

The past 10 days or so have been very hectic, and I’ve learned a couple of things about participating in an online discussion that I guess I’ve always known to be true, but it’s all come back home since this H1N1 virus hit.

Some of you, out there in Internet land, are just frickin’ rude.

Mind you, I’m not talking about getting my own feelings hurt.  What I’m talking about here is that the Internet has allowed anyone to have an anonymous voice for saying  whatever they want to say.

I’m all about free speech, but I’m also about taking responsibility for your actions.

I’ve learned (and again, I already knew this, but boy it hit home) that some people just need something to complain about.  If you don’t put info out there for them, they complain.  If you do put info out there for them, the complain about the info that you’ve put out, or the info that you’re not putting out that they need to know right now.

Case and point.  Our district started a Twitter account just as another avenue to get information to the public about what was going on with the closure due to H1N1.  There were people who signed up for Twitter accounts just to follow us, and some of those people, the only posts they had on their Twitter accounts were @ reply complaints to us (dig through some of those…there’s some really nasty ones).  Seriously.  If the only reason you’re signing up for an account is to gripe, don’t sign up.  And by the way, if you’re going to be rude and demanding information, don’t expect an answer.

There was another gentleman who followed us that griped when we tweeted the proceedings of a school board meeting.  If we hadn’t put any info out, he probably would have complained about that, too.

Another problem I have with all of this anonymous griping is that now the news sites are getting in on the game.  They allow anyone to register for an account and comment on their stories.  In the past, people who wrote letters to the editor of a newspaper at least had to have their name verified, and their name and city got published along with their letter, opening them to public ridicule if their comments were stupid.

Now, there isn’t any accountability, and that, combined with people’s lack of tact and a filter, has lead the stupid right out in the open.

Just take a look at any of your local news sites and you’ll see exactly what I mean.  The comments about “the illegals” and the personal sniping that has gone in the comments sections of the local stories about H1N1 just shows how idiotic people can be, and I don’t think it has any place on a news site.

Whatever happened to shame?  Whatever happened to disgracing your family name?  There was a time in America where people had morals, and when the moral code was broken, people were shamed.  That moral code has gotten looser and looser, to the point where nothing is shameful anymore.

Now don’t get me confused with some right-wing nut job.  I think that people ought to be left alone to do their own thing, but when others start trying to tell me that this or that is going to ruin the moral fabric of this country, I just have to look around and laugh.  The moral fabric of this country was tattered and torn long, long ago, and the people screaming the loudest are more than likely the ones who helped rip it to shreds.

So what will the turning point be?  When will poeple STFU and realize that they sound stupid when they spout off?  Will it take a major news site requiring the name and address of anyone who wants to comment, and publishing that information along with their comments?  I don’t know, but something has to give, and soon.  Children are growing up now with a sense that they can say whatever they want, whenever they want, and suffer no consequences.

What happened to the consequences of saying something stupid, or acting like a jerk in public?

It’s been a little busy around here

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, the H1N1 (swine flu) virus has taken over our area.  The school district I work for was the first in the state, and the country, to shut down because of the virus.

You would think I’d be relaxing poolside with a cold one in my hand, but you’d be thinking wrong.

Being part of the tech staff means that you get to help in spreading the word when there’s an emergency.  I have become, in this past week, part of the PR team for our district.

Now understand, I’m not complaining one bit.  I’m actually enjoying the challenge this change in routine has brought on.  I’m able to use my understanding of the tools out there to help our district spread the word about anything and everything related to this closure.

It started on Sunday, when I got a call from my boss.  “The Superintendent wants to do a podcast,” he said, “and was wondering if you could come up and help her do it.”

I had heard Saturday that we’d be closing one high school, but on Sunday, it all changed when the Department of State Health Services shut down our entire district.  Word needed to get out quickly, and in as many ways as possible.  We’d updated the web site, and put out an auto-call, but there were more ways to get the message out, so I opened up my arsenal and started asking permission.

The two things that we’ve done this week, based on my suggestion, was to start a Twitter account for the district, and to live stream the Superintendent’s daily press briefings on UStream.  Sunday and early Monday, I was tweeting district updates on my own twitter account and on Facebook, but it got to be a bit much, and I didn’t want “official” word coming from me.  I wanted it to be something that people could look at and say, “Yes, this belongs to the district.”  So up went the district’s twitter account.  In just over 48 hours, we’ve gained almost 100 followers, including several of the local news outlets and reporters.  Several of the names I recognized as district teachers (and I was surprised by how many of them are on twitter), and several more are students – it’s easy to tell the students by their user names or profiles.

The UStream of the press briefing got its first trial today.  While the audio was off a bit, I think if the Superintendent just speaks up a little it will be fine.  Unfortunately, UStream is having recording issues, so there was no way for us to have it available for playback.  We embedded the stream on the district home page for the duration of the press briefing, and I also put the URL for the UStream page on Twitter.  At one point, we had about 20 people watching, which was way more than I expected.  Only one question came in via Twitter, although I expect more tomorrow.

Every evening, I get the audio for the podcast from the Superintendent, edit for about 20-30 minutes and post it to the district home page, as well as her podcast page.  If she sends me the transcript of the podcast, I post that to her blog page as well.

Luckily, our web site has been holding up incredibly well under the strain.  Before this week, our normal, weekday average was 2500 hits per day, and that’s with students in the district opening the web page any time they open a browser.

On Saturday, we had almost 4000 hits.  Sunday, we broke 10,000.  We had another 10,000 Monday, and dipped to 7300 yesterday, but as of this posting, we’re at 11,500 and will probably hit 12,000 before midnight this evening.

Our distrit has gotten national attention because of this outbreak, and I hope that the information we’re putting out has been able to keep people informed.  We’re doing as much as we can, as best as we can.  Our Superintendent has been doing an outstanding job, and has been interviewed by major news outlets all over the country, from the Wall Street Journal to NPR.  And every night, before she goes home for the day, she sits down and records audio for me to edit for the podcast.  With everything else on her plate, I’m proud of her for sticking with it.

Hopefully, when all of this is over with, we’ll continue to put our information out there using Web 2.0 tools. Hopefully, this this a turning point for our district in information distribution!

What marketing execs don’t get about Twitter

So the world is all a-twitter now that Oprah is on, and I’m sure there will be millionns of new people trying it out just because She is on.

I was watching the news this morning and heard a story about Pizza Hut looking for an intern in social media.  Of course, the news story called it a twittern.  But here’s the thing. Big companies just don’t get it.

What I envision is some marketing hot shot thinking “Hey, let’s get Pizza Hut on this Twitter thing.  Oprah’s doing it, why can’t we?”  The problem is, people who use social media aren’t dumb. They use it because the want to follow someone, not because they’re forced to.  Social media is so completely different than traditional media…you don’t sit idly by while you are bombarded with advertisements.  In fact, in my own experience, if someone in the social media groups you follow starts throwing out advertisements, you just block, unfriend, or don’t follow them.

I’m starting to notice this trend on Twitter of people following me who don’t have anything in common with me.  It’s so easy to follow someone, why not just mass follow a whole bunch of people in the hopes that they’ll reciprocate, right? But like most of the people I know who use social media tools, I check out everyone who follows me.  If their twitter page looks like a bunch of ads, or if they aren’t giving me information I need, I’m not going to follow them.

The people I follow on my social networks fall into three categories: 1) Family and friends, 2) Learning network – professionals who are in education and technology, 3) Celebs I like.

If anyone that I follow abuses twitter, I stop following them.  Simple as that.  Early on, there was a professional contact who tweeted 5 times within about 10 minutes.  To me, that’s abusing the system.  You’re not tweeting, you’re putting up a blog post in 5 parts.  Use your blog for that.

And that’s what ad execs don’t get.  I see them flooding their followers with advertisements, and the thing about social media is that we don’t want to watch ads.  If we did, we’d sit in front of the TV, where we don’t have to participate.

Touchpad vs mouse

I’m sitting here at home, watching my not-quite-three-year-old daughter navigating the PBS Kids web site, and building sandcastles with Curious George on my wife’s laptop, and found myself wondering if she would be able to do as well with a mouse as she does with a touchpad.

As she moves the mouse around, any time she wants to click, she takes her finger completely off the touchpad, then moves to the buttons.  With a mouse, she wouldn’t be able to do that.  The mouse would continue to move around as she tried to click the button.

Which got me thinking about adults.  Using a mouse doesn’t come easily to older folks, and I’ve seen firsthand fully grown adults who can’t hold a mouse still while they try to double click, or even single click.  Maybe that’s what leads to some of the anxiety adults feel when they try to use computers for the first time.  The hand-eye coordination can be difficult, at best, if you’ve never used a mouse.  At least with a touchpad, you can take your eyes away from the screen and focus on your finger, and don’t have to worry about moving the cursor when you want to click.

And by the way, just the fact that my 2 3/4 year old can navigate with a mouse freaks me out.