If you’ve been on Facebook in the past few days and you’re friends with anyone at Georgetown, you’ve probably noticed the rapidly growing “KEEP PHILLY PIZZA FROM GETTING SHUT DOWN” group pop up in your newsfeed.

The group, started by Alex Carroll (COL ’11), who has done on-campus marketing for the pizza joint in the past, the group’s description claims that “[The] ANC is threatening to close down Philly Pizza, so they need our help to continue business. We need a 1,000 people to join this group for them to stay alive!”

And they’re well on their way to the 1,000 member mark.  The group was just started on Sunday evening and already has more than 870 members.

According to Carroll, one the owners of Philly P, Matt Kocak, told him that the ANC is pushing to make them close earlier, around 11 p.m., which would be a significant blow to their business.

Kocak asked Carroll to create the Facebook group so that he could demonstrate to the ANC that his business has student support.

The Voice recently covered the testy relations between Philly P and the ANC, and it seems tensions have only mounted in the past few weeks.  Look for more about the current dispute in this week’s paper!

Won’t you lend a hand to your better-off but over-stressed fellow Hoyas?

When Vox put up a post about a Georgetown sophomore’s quest to find a Personal Assistant last Friday, we unwittingly released quite a firestorm—123 comments and counting, and links from Wonkette and Inside Higher Ed.

We figured it would all blow over soon, the kid would walk away with his ego somewhat deflated, and that would be that.  But apparently the post didn’t just inspire an onlaught vicious comments—it also inspired a copy-cat.

The intrepid reporters at the Heckler‘s blog just found a suspiciously similar job posting put up on the on the Student Employment Office website yesterday by a junior in the SFS who’s looking for a “Project Assistant and Task Coordinator.”

While that title sounds much fancier than “Personal Assistant,” it’s essentially the same job (and at the same $10 – $12 per hour going rate):

I am a Georgetown Undergraduate student, seeking a mature individual to help me with daily tasks, organization and errands … A portion of the work should be interesting and engaging (such as correspondence or planning events and logistics), and this is a good opportunity to meet new people.

Please email a resume (if available) and a brief description of your availability and interest. Preference will be given to a Georgetown student or person who lives near campus. Must be reliable and good communicator (regularly checks email, updates me on the status of tasks or problems, etc.). Should have familiarity with GTD and good with computers (but specialized skills can be taught). Non-smoker preferred. Male and female applicants welcome.

Example tasks include: -Manage Email -Drop-off/pick-up dry cleaning -Do Laundry (in townhouse) -File papers -Manage electronic accounts -Input dates into calendar -Shopping and Running Errands -Making orders online -Making appointments and reservations -Making travel arrangements (i.e. taxis, car reservations) -Planning events -Managing written correspondence -Load/Empty dishwasher -Drop-off/pick-up books at library.

Two’s a trend!

Read the full posting after the jump…

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Being a Personal Assistant: If it’s good enough for Anne Hathaway, it’s good enough for you!

Depressing job market got you down?  Never fear, your fellow Hoya is here to help!

In what is easily the most absurd job posting ever to be put up on the Student Employment Office website, it appears one Georgetown sophomore is already so busy he feels the need to hire his own personal assistant.

You see, he may not even be an upperclassman yet, but this guy has commitments—he’s a student and a “part time employee in the financial services industry”—and can’t be bogged down with mundane tasks like doing his own laundry.  That’s what a PA—who would work an hour per day, five days a week, and receive $12 per hour—is for!

As my PA you will receive an email once a day by 9:00 am with a task list for that day and a time estimate for each task. Important tasks will be bolded on the list and must be done that day (even though everything on the list should theoretically be finished on a daily basis) …

PA example tasks -Organize closet -make bed -Drop off / pick up dry cleaning -Drop me off / pick me up from work -Do laundry -Fill up gas tank -bring car for servicing -schedule appointment for haircut -Pay parking tickets -manage electronic accounts -shopping and running errands -other random tasks.

Preference will be given to applicants who are comfortable with city driving (car will be provided) and who are available when I need to be picked up and dropped off for work. Preference will also be given to Georgetown undergrads for convenience.

Read the full job posting after the jump!

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Twitter gets its academics on

While anyone who has interacted with UIS knows technology isn’t exactly Georgetown’s strong suit, the University has been exploring this newfangled social media thing, even setting up its own Twitter account.

But how does Georgetown’s Twitter usage stack up with other top universities?  UniversitiesAndColleges.org recently crunched the numbers to find out which schools in the top 100 of U.S. News and World Report‘s college rankings are doing, and Georgetown is in the middle of the pack.

Besides the main @Georgetown account, the University runs 8 other Twitter accounts, earning them a 36th place showing in the Number of Accounts ranking.  On average, Georgetown-affiliated Twitter accounts produce 16.3 tweets per day, earning us 52nd place showing on the Total Tweets Per Day ranking.

With those accounts following 1,143 other users, Georgetown came 43rd on the Number of Users Following list.  Our real weak point is how many other Twitter users are following Georgetown-affiliated accounts.  With only 2,038 followers, Georgetown came in 64th on the Number of Followers ranking.

Vox says Georgetown would probably be doing much better if the administration had allowed the @JackDeGioia account to survive…

Lauinger Library finally got a spruce-up.  Unfortunately we’re not talking about the physical space—we’re talking about their web presence.

Today, the library revealed its newly redesigned website, and it looks pretty snazzy. With a nice blue and gray wave theme, the new site features well organized sidebars and three separate search options on front page.

The library also devoted prominent spots on their new hompage to featuring delightful library productions like this “Mysteries of the Reference Desk” video (Georgetown YouTube Madness candidate? Absolutely!) and highlighting some of their lesser-known partners like the Writing Center and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.

According to the Internet Archive, the Library’s website hasn’t been revamped since January 2005, so they were in for an upgrade.  You can also give them feedback on the new website and suggest tweaks you’d like to see here.

While we were busy covering start-ups like the Hoya Insider and the Georgetown University Examiner, we missed some great blogging action that’s been going on from a major Georgetown institution: the Corp.

You won’t find it under the blog section of their newly redesigned website, but Ryan Callahan (SFS ’10) has quietly been chronicling his adventures as Corp CEO at The Back Hallway since February.  Posts are fairly infrequent, but when he writes them, they tend to be pretty insightful.

According to its inaugural post, Callahan started the blog with the hopes of giving Corpies insight into what it’s like to have a leadership position and making the Corp more accountable to the wider Georgetown community.

In the past few months he’s written about how the Board of Directors works, the challenges posed by the introduction of on campus competitors like Starbucks and Cosi, the great bagel switch, the future of the DPAC cafe and more.

Speaking of intenet increasing transparency of campus organizations: oh my, what hath yesterday’s Tweetacular wrought?

I’m almost at a loss for words for how to describe FINIS Magazine, the latest journalistic endeavor to emerge from Georgetown undergrads this summer (move over, Hoya Insider!). So, I’ll just let  FINIS founder Carlisle Alessandra Williams (COL ’10) do it for me.

“It’s a journal for people who, well, would read something whose title is in Latin,” Williams told the Peter J. Grace, the Georgetown University Examiner and, not incidentally, a writer for FINIS. “It’s a no-holds-barred reflection of our culture and lifestyles. The audience is definitely intellectually curious young twenty-somethings, who don’t take themselves too seriously.”

Uh-oh.

Fortunately for me, though, I took some Latin in college (if you’re wondering what “finis” means, I’ll give you a hint: it doesn’t mean beginning). Williams also states that the magazine was born out of her examination of the problems of print media and her attempt to find an “entirely different medium.”

As FINIS’s introduction states:

“As a response to the growing concern about the state of print journalism, this new publication seeks to develop an innovative approach to bringing creative writing, solid journalism, and introspective social commentary to the intellectually curious on the Internet.”

In other words: take note, dying print publications.

But enough dilly-dallying. When I finally checked out the site, I found everything you would expect from a publication which, in the words of Grace, “continues [the] quest for amusement for the young and idle rich.”

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TheHoya.com in happier times…

For the past couple weeks we’ve been wondering what’s going on with the Hoya‘s website. TheHoya.com has been displaying a variety of things—a standard issue “down for maintenance” message, ads for a web-hosting service and, briefly, their tech guy Ryan J. Zambon’s personal homepage—but not the actual Hoya website. Their website currently shows an article about the passing of Father King underneath the “down for maintenance” banner.

Doing maintenance during the summer’s no big, but being down for a whole two week stretch makes it seem like you’re doing a little more than standard-issue touch-ups.

According to Hoya Editor in Chief Kevin Barber, the site’s down as they switch servers in preparation for the eventual launch of a new website:

We’re currently in the process of switching our server prior to launching an entirely new web site. (No specific timetable on that.) The regular site should be back up fairly soon; for the time being we’ve restored our main two blogs [The Hoya Paranoia and Outside the Gates], and we also posted a story about Fr. King on our temporary main site because it was important news. Most of our new content during the summer thus far has been on our blogs.

It’s quite irritating, but the summer is obviously the best time to do this sort of work.

Photo from einet.net.

Anyone walking through campus yesterday probably noticed the ubiquitous flyers for something called the “Hoya Insider.” They were pretty sparse, with just a url (www.hoyainsider.com), a tagline (“An inside look into Georgetown University”), an entreaty that you “check it out” and a color picture of Healy Hall or Jack.

So what’s the deal? Who splurges on color printing and plasters campus with flyers in places they know they’ll be taken down (as of this morning, it looked like most of them had been removed from non-flyering-approved areas)?

The man behind the flyers is Chris Trahos (MSB ’10), who started a blog about Georgetown a week and a half ago. So far Hoya Insider has a grand total of four posts—an introduction, something about the new MSB hires, a list of notable alumni cribbed from Wikipedia and an explanation of the history of Jack the Bulldog taken directly from the Georgetown Traditions website.

Not exactly a strong start, but here’s what Trahos had to say in an email about his goals for the blog:

What inspired me to start writing Hoya Insider is that I wanted to give students, professors, alumni, and fans of Georgetown an inside look into what is going on in and around the campus. Not only do I intend to provide insight into the major events on campus, but also the subtle nuances of campus life.

I really hope Hoya Insider will serve as the eyes and ears for alumni and fans of Georgetown interested in keeping up-to-date with the university. I plan to cover a range of topics including student activities/achievements, professor research, sports events, school programs, speaker events, etc.

McMahan and Iraheta in Iran

Two Georgetown grad students, Justin McMahan and Andrea Iraheta, have been traveling through the Middle East and keeping a blog, Dispatches from the Region, about their journey. Things were going well, and “Dispatches from the Reason” seemed like your run-of-the-mill travel blog with a slight political bent, with posts about them enjoying Istanbul, witnessing an election in Beirut, et cetra. But then the couple ended up in Tehran during the Iranian election and its resultant chaos.

On June 11th, a day before the election, they wrote and oddly prescient post entitled “Something big may be about to ‘Pop’“. Two days later, they wrote that they could see plumes of black smoke and protesters. Later that day, they wrote:

Just outside of our hotel, supporters of former PM Mousavi set fires and broke windows in protest of the results of yesterday’s election. Motorcycles race up and down the street as protesters play a game of cat and mouse with security officials. Smoke is everywhere. Protesters have broken windows of the Bank of Tehran across the street …

Just within the past hour, when we try to access social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, a message in Farsi indicates that the sites are no longer accessible. Cell phone access seems to have been shut down throughout the entire city.

They were also able to get a 30 second video of the scene outside their hotel.

After a brief trip to Shiraz, a city in southwest Iran, they returned to Tehran and witnessed the crackdown in full effect, writing, “[P]olice employed water canons, tear gas and batons to break up the rally.”

The couple is now in Cairo and were recently interviewed on Good Morning America Weekend about their experiences.