space

In an appeal to the coveted youth vote in the upcoming presidential elections, MySpace and MTV announced Thursday that they have joined forces for a series of "one-on-one dialogues" with all the major candidates from both political parties--televised and Webcast events in which presidential hopefuls will answer questions from MySpace members and MTV watchers. Formally, it's a collaboration between MySpace's "Impact" political channel and MTV's "Choose or Lose" election effort (which it has been operating since the dinosaur days of the 1992 election), and it's the first collaboration that the … Read more

Social networking site Bebo, with a 36-million-strong member base centered primarily in the U.K., announced Tuesday that it has partnered with Microsoft on a new instant messaging initiative. The Windows Live Messenger service, formerly known as MSN Messenger, is now the fuel behind Bebo's new internal IMing operations.

Bebo users who have hooked their Windows Live usernames up to the service have an "IM Me" button on their profiles that they can use to communicate with other members in-browser if they're online, but Bebo's IM is also open to members without Windows Live Messenger. … Read more

If you enjoyed the first round of Photosynth'd pictures of NASA shuttle Endeavor, you'll probably enjoy these. Taken in space by the crew of the International Space Station, the newly uploaded shots show off the underside of the space shuttle, which the Microsoft Labs team is touting as a "first-hand look at what you might see on a space-walk." Of course, when it comes to the underside of space shuttles, astronauts are usually inspecting these things for damage while hurtling hundreds of miles an hour above the Earth. You can do this from the comfort of … Read more

I heard on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday that it was 30 years ago that NASA sent Voyager 2 into space with the music of Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Beethoven, Bach, and a wide selection of world music. The disc that also contained images of Earth, and the sounds of whales, a baby crying, and waves breaking on a shore. The NASA scientists must have felt sound was one of the best ways to communicate human experience of the 20th century to intelligent life in the distant future.

The gold-plated, 12-inch copper disc was an all-analog recording, probably because that … Read more

On Tuesday, NASA astronaut Barbara Morgan made a call from the International Space Station to a group of science students in Idaho, giving them a 20-minute lesson on life in space from 200 miles above Earth.

The call was a reminder of the last teacher to attempt an orbital trip nearly 20 years ago, as The New York Times points out here (subscription required). In 1986, Morgan was the backup "education astronaut" for Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who was killed when the shuttle Challenger broke up 73 seconds into the flight.

Morgan, who was formerly a teacher at … Read more

New research from the mobile-focused statistics firm M:Metrics has focused on exactly how many mobile-phone customers are using their handsets to access social networks and blogs, and the results aren't particularly surprising: not a whole lot of people are.

In the month of June, a total of only 12.3 million mobile consumers in the United States and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) accessed a social-networking site or blog on their phones at least once. In the U.K., this came out to a total of only 2.5 percent of mobile users; … Read more

Some interesting ComScore numbers have just been documented by CNET's sister site ZDNet: social-networking site Bebo, always more of a presence in the U.K. than stateside, has soared ahead of global leader MySpace on its home turf. In the month of July, the ComScore statistics say, Bebo logged 10.7 million unique visitors in the U.K. and MySpace trailed with 10.1.

This marks the first time that ComScore's statistics have shown Bebo ahead of MySpace. And it should be noted that these pertain to unique visitors, not registered users or page views.

In third place, … Read more

Quincy Jones has launched a series of video podcasts with behind-the-scenes looks at some of his projects with famous artists.

As part of the new series, the music, film, theater and television-producing legend has relaunched his MySpace page to include streams of the videos, as well as a list of his achievements and music selections to listen to while you visit.

Jones has technically been a member of MySpace since October 18,2006, according to his profile.

The video series can also be subscribed to via the podcast section of Apple's iTunes store. But can the icon make a … Read more

Apparently, what happens on MySpace doesn't always float in Vegas: A substitute judge in the North Las Vegas Justice Court got sacked last week because of some nasty stuff he said on his social-networking profile about prosecutors.

The 34-year-old criminal defense attorney, Jonathan MacArthur, had been appointed as a judge pro tempore in anticipation of a full judicial post that would be available in 2009. Unfortunately, MacArthur wrote on his MySpace profile that his interests included "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's a**...and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's … Read more