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MySpace touts early success with political polling initiative

Some people say political polls mean nothing. MySpace disagrees: the News Corp.-owned social network has announced that the results of its first "Impact" political polls are in, and that it will continue conducting polls each month as the 2008 presidential election draws closer.

According to MySpace representatives, the poll revealed a few key facts: that MySpace's young user base is more politically engaged and active than the U.S. population at large, that they tend to be politically independent, and that they plan to vote in the 2008 election. It's convenient news for MySpace, which … Read more

NASA delaying space shuttle launch until at least Saturday

For those of you who made plans to visit NASA's Kennedy Space Center today to see the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, you'd better hope you can keep your hotel room another day.

That's because the space agency announced this morning that it has decided to delay Atlantis' launch until at least Saturday because "of a problem with a fuel cutoff sensor system inside the shuttle's external fuel tank," according to a NASA press release.

The shuttle program managers expect to have a meeting Friday afternoon at Kennedy Space Center to decide what … Read more

Police and press wise up to crime clips on YouTube

We've just witnessed a potentially disturbing marriage of basic street crime and the instant worldwide audience provided by video sharing and social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.

Criminals have often recorded their exploits for fun, but the ease of online sharing means that almost everyone can now witness assorted muggings, fights, and robberies from the safety of a laptop screen. At the same time, crimes posted to the Web get instant attention from law enforcement and the press, essentially acting as online wanted posters for the perpetrators. A perfect example is a recent subway attack video first … Read more

Sensors scuttle Thursday shuttle plans

Space shuttle Atlantis was scheduled to make a run to the international space station today, to carry Europe's lab "Columbus" to its new home. But of the four gauges for the ship's liquid hydrogen fuel tanks, two were malfunctioning, indicating a dry tank when it was full. Atlantis and its crew of seven astronauts will stay Earthside until the problem is fixed.

Read the full AP story on CNN: "NASA scrubs Atlantis launch"

MySpace tragedy and 'helicopter parenting'

I've been searching for something intelligent to add to the discussion about Megan Meier, the 13-year-old girl who committed suicide after she was insulted and dumped by an "online boyfriend" on MySpace. The online persona "Josh" was actually a fictitious hoax created by an adult neighbor who was a mother of one of Megan's friends.

It's one of those senseless tragedies that is difficult to comprehend and put into any kind of perspective, especially seeing Megan's mother appear on The Today Show this week. Matt Lauer asked Tina Meier to speak out against the retaliatory online harassment toward the bullying neighbor, who has been publicly named. My heart broke seeing a grieving, outraged parent put on the spot as the one asked to rise above the cycle of violence. She clearly wasn't ready to do so, and it would have been a lot more productive to ask a more objective anti-bullying expert to speak out against the dangers of vigilantism.

I finally found an intelligent synthesis written by Judith Warner on her Domestic Disturbances blog. She links Megan Meier's bullying to the "helicopter parenting" phenomenon. … Read more

Buy now, pay forever: the business of tech toys

The New York Times' Technology section leads with the story headlined "For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device," declaring:

Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year. For preschoolers.

On the plus side, retailers and toymakers have learned that children are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Hooray for authenticity!

On the minus side...… Read more

Killer Download: Make space on your hard drive

When I bought a gaming PC for home use a little over a year ago, I bought a middle-of-the-road machine that had everything I needed with a little room to upgrade later on down the line. I got a 2.2GHz processor, a high-end (at the time) video card so I could play the latest games, 2 gigs of RAM (on the advice of a gamer friend), and I opted for a 120GB hard drive to save a little money.

At the time, it seemed like 120GB would be more than enough. After all, I can remember when a 1GB hard drive was the pinnacle of storage capacity--120GB ought to be able to hold anything right? Games these days generally take up a few gigs each so I thought I would never run out of space. I now know I was wrong. If you wait long enough, even the biggest hard drives will fill up.… Read more

MSN's 'stuffing the tail back into the head' strategy

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--In the wake of Yahoo's corporate troubles, and the long-ago collapses of sites and services like AltaVista, Excite, and others, some may be tempted to think that the era of the portal has come and gone.

Not so, says Microsoft's MSN.

In fact, Joanne Bradford, MSN's corporate vice president and chief media officer, said that around her shop, people look at all kinds of sites, including Facebook, MySpace.com, and YouTube as portals, and that these days, MSN's own plan revolves around a portal-like existence.

"Everything is starting to look like portals,&… Read more

Phoenix news team "investigates" new teachers' MySpace pages

Here's the lede from a Phoenix local news story: "CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web."

Is it really a news flash to learn that recent college grads who are now teachers use MySpace? And that teachers have content on their MySpace pages that they don't want their first-graders to see?

Here comes the online networking generation gap, moving from college into the working world.

Most college students use online social networks, so most new teachers will have social network profiles. And yes, some of the MySpace and Facebook pages will still bear traces of sophomoric behavior on them, given that these new teachers are only a few years removed from being sophomores.

Am I concerned about this issue as a parent? Yes, of course, potentially. But this particular "investigation" looks like a low trick (or height of FARK) as the CBS 5 team decided to systematically snoop into teachers' pages. The news program says they "took a list of teachers who just started teaching in Arizona and searched for them one at a time on MySpace, checking to see which ones have profiles and what they might show."

What disturbs me most is that the CBS 5 story moves to the question of what kind of "higher standards" we hold teachers to and is more than willing to keep raising the bar to create wildly unrealistic standards of off-duty conduct. … Read more