If Vox Populi doesn’t quite fill all your blogging desires, on Nov. 4 students will see one more website popping up on laptops in lecture halls.  

That day will mark the launch of Hoya Hub, a new website covering all aspects of the college experience, developed by Felipe Ernst (MSB ‘14). The website has been in development since January, when Ernst came up with the idea in collaboration with his brother, Alejandro, a junior in high school. As a D.C. local, Ernst felt most Georgetown students lacked a complete picture of what the University and city have to offer.

“I was born and raised in the D.C. area, and it seemed as if there was a lack of information that Georgetown students knew about the area,” Ernst said. “The point is to acquaint all incoming and current students with a better sense of information on all important categories that they’ll need to survive.”

The version of the site that will launch on Sunday will have three categories—education, social, and sports—and students will be able to create an account by signing in with their Georgetown email address. Ernst has plans for six other categories: marketplace, housing, food, news, services, and health, which will hopefully be up and running by January of 2013.

“We’re trying to accomplish this by finding certain info on the market and then have user-generated content to help enrich the site,” explained Ernst.

The education category will contain information about professors, clubs, classes, as well as resources such as tutoring. It will include professor rankings that will be more accurate and consistent than those from “Rate My Professor,” as it will specifically target Georgetown professors. Students will also be able to comment on their experiences in classes.

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In an email sent to students, the new Provost Robert Groves announced the inaugural post of a blog he will maintain throughout the semester. He titles the first post “Our Moment in Time,” in which he discusses the future of research and innovation at Georgetown. He reflects on the introduction of online courses and other advancements in the education over the past years, stressing Georgetown’s need to balance the use of “new techniques” and “traditional methods.”

“Georgetown needs to remain focused on the end, not just the means. Its legacy consists of students as whole persons filled to their individual capacity with knowledge and skills in the service of others,” Groves wrote.

He encourages students to follow his new Twitter, as well, which he says he will update whenever he posts a new blog entry. He added that he hopes students will comment in response to each blog post.

“We lucked out,” Groves ended his first post. “We got to be at Georgetown at a time of unprecedented opportunity.”

Georgetown has had its share of campus celebrities over the last few years: Charlie Cooper, that kid who shot the toilet, the governator’s daughter, the iPod vigilante, and a host of bloggers, just to mention a few.

Joey Pearson (SFS ’14) seems to be the latest edition to our G-list celebs. Pearson’s YouTube account, the earliest entries of which feature Pearson singing hymns and pop songs while video blogging, has lately consisted of his Village C dorm room, advice for fellow freshmen, and stories about his experiences on campus.

Freshman tales aside, guy’s got some talent—he’s recorded five albums, according to an interview with the Hoya, and appeared on Star Search as a child.

The tragic flaw of many bloggers is thinking that anyone gives a shit about what they have to say. But, we have to give Pearson credit; he clearly loves Georgetown, he wants other students to enjoy college as much as he does, and the kid’s got a pretty good voice. (The thousand people who subscribe to his YouTube account don’t hurt his cause either.)

Welcome to the club, Joey. Just try to avoid ending up on Gawker.

After the jump, we’ve got some of Pearson’s latest clips about the bookstore and NSO.

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Remember that time you (a stupid act) in hopes that you could (a sexual activity) with (object of your sexual desire)? Well, now you can tell the internet about it!

Worsthookups.com, a site that chronicles “golden hookup experiences that are worth sharing with the world,” launched earlier this month under the watchful eyes of three current Georgetown students and one NYU student.

“After a traumatizing hookup experience, [we] looked for a place to post the story online and realized that no such website existed—and so began WorstHookups.com,” one founder, an MSB student in the Class of 2011 who requested anonymity, wrote in an e-mail. “WorstHookups.com provides people an opportunity to post their stories anonymously in a place where the people will appreciate them.”

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Georgetown Blog Hub, the yet-to-be-launched website that co-founder Laura Sortwell (MSB ’10) once called “a one-stop place to stay in touch with Georgetown,” is getting a makeover.

The site, which now operates under the name “What Rocks,” is set to launch in late August. Sortwell and co-founder Jess Lioon (MSB ’10) even added four students to their staff—Lance Pauker (COL ’12), Ben Goldhaber (SFS ’12), Erin Booth (COL ’12), and Sandy Moss (SFS ’11).

A quick look at the beta version of What Rocks reveals that the site is sticking to its “blog hub” roots. What Rocks is meant to be a “fully integrated multimedia experience,” according to its mission statement.

Currently, What Rocks has only published a handful of blog posts, but Pauker is confident that the site will live up to its self-described “media mashup” goal.

“Everyone at Georgetown, like it or not, is a nerd in some way,” Pauker wrote in an e-mail. “What Rocks provides an outlet to express that awesome nerdiness.”

When the site launches in August, all users will have the opportunity to publish content.

“[I]t is pretty much a combination of the fun, social networking aspect of sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter with the substance and intellectual nature of the Huffington Post, the Voice, etc.” Pauker added.

While Vox hopes that the site succeeds, similar sites have flopped in the past. (Remember iHoyaSaxa? Neither does anyone else.)

At the very least, Pauker promises that What Rocks will throw a “sweet launch party” in August that will “undoubtedly provide an excellent opportunity for the guy who runs drunkengeorgetownstudents.com to showcase his dazzling talents.”

Welcome to the world of Georgetown blogging, What Rocks. It was getting a bit lonely, so we’re glad to have you join us.

We have a confession to make: our blogroll is woefully outdated and incomplete. So, that’s where you can help!

Do you blog? Are you at all related to Georgetown University? If so, fill out the form below and we’ll be happy to add you to our soon-to-be updated blog roll.

Georgetown has a short, but spectacular history of well-run student blogs, so we know there’s plenty out there just waiting to be discovered. So have at it—you may just be the next VFT, College Prepster, or @KingGeorgetown.

Blog name/URL
Brief description of your blog
Your Name
Your School/Year
Your E-mail Address
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Hoyas Anonymous (“Hoyas on the outside, Human on the inside”) has had plenty of boring phases since the Postsecret-style website started back in October of 2008. But oh how they’ve flourished in the past few weeks, with new scandalous, sad, and downright weird confessions appearing almost daily on their site.

Today, they’ll be in Red Square from noon to 3 p.m. to collect students’ scribbled confidences. We encourage you to drop by their table. To inspire you, here are some of the more intriguing posts they’ve had this month:

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If you ever needed proof that Georgetowners are sometimes way too fond of their community, look no further than Carol Joynt’s bizarre treatise on why Georgetown should secede from D.C. to form its own city.

No, you did not misread me. In a weird and naive jeremiad about how much the rest of the District sucks, Joynt suggests we go Confederate on their asses, leaving their Home Rule-less, broke city behind:

“Reason one is that DC’s not going to get home rule. I just don’t see it happening. Why should we wait around, caving into powerlessness, when we could come together to create a governing body that helps to improve the quality of living right here where we live? ….

“If you think about it, it makes sense. If you live in Georgetown, how much of the management of the city government relates to you in a positive way? How many city government decisions are made with Georgetown even remotely in the equation?

“On the other hand, we pay high taxes. I would imagine a good chunk of the parking enforcement haul comes from Georgetown. We are a major tourist attraction, from which the city benefits. I’m just not convinced an appropriate amount of our tax dollars come back to Georgetown.”

Joynt also points out how super unfair it is that Georgetown has to share their councilmember, Jack Evans, “with too wide a swatch of the city and other neighborhoods that don’t share all our issues.”

Later in the day, a friend expressed concern that Georgetown would do a severe disservice to neighborhoods like Anacostia who benefit from Georgetown tax dollars, Joynt was not at all worried:

“Being our own city wouldn’t mean that Georgetown would become irresponsible. We would give and be involved in ways of our own choosing, and hopefully more effectively. [She] feared, too, that Georgetown would lose any hope of diversity. But if we were a well-run community we could attract more diversity, yes? It was an interesting debate.”

Basically, Joynt is saying, the rest of D.C. will miss us when we’re gone and saving them from the outside, and lots of people from all background will vie for entry to our idyllic, magnanimous community.

Wanna bet?

Maybe none of you liked Provost Jim O’Donnell’s suggestion that Georgetown professors find creative ways to hold class on a snow day, but Communications, Culture and Technology Professor Diana Owen did. When she read O’Donnell’s e-mail encouraging professors to use technology to continue teaching, Owen told Vox in an e-mail, she was intrigued rather than annoyed.

So although she was holed up in her home in Maryland on Tuesday morning, unable to get to campus and surrounded by downed trees and powerlines, Owen still managed to hold her twenty-person, 10:15 a.m. “Media and Politics” seminar using a real-time blog.

“Within minutes, students were generating thoughtful, quality posts that drew upon course readings, previous discussions, current media developments, and their own insights,” Owen wrote in her e-mail. “I felt more like a participant in the discussion than a teacher telling things to students.”

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Is Vox‘s extensive blog roll not quite satisfying your Georgetown blogosphere needs?  Well Laura Sortwell (MSB ’10) and Jessica Lioon (MSB ’10) are looking out for you.  Sortwell and Lioon are starting up a Georgetown “blog hub” that will aggregate content from blogs run by Georgetown students, alums, and faculty.

In a post on her personal blog, Sortwell explained the motivation behind the project:

We want to create a forum in which Hoyas can share their ideas, show their expertise on trends and topics in the industry, facilitate discussion, seek new career opportunities, establish business contacts, develop knowledge resources, showcase their work, seek advice, and meet other alumni/students with similar interests.

According to Sortwell, the website–inspired by the Mashable model—is their independent study project (both are studying marketing).  The idea came to her after she took an advertising class that focused on marketing and social media.

“There aren’t many schools doing anything like this,” Sortwell said. “It would be a one-stop place to stay in touch with Georgetown.  We kind of want it to be a continuation of the intellectual but fun conversations you have at Georgetown.”

Sortwell and Lioon wouldn’t say how many bloggers have approached them about participating, but Sortwell did say they have “gotten an even better response than we expected.”  The two are still looking for a good name for the site–they’ve considered names like “Hoya Network,” “Red Square” and “The Front Gates”—but they hope to have it up and running within a month.