NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander successfully landed on the pole of Mars about 40 minutes ago.

Check back here later tonight for a recorded feed into the Mission Control room of the descent to our red neighbor.

God Bless America!

I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with our universe/solar system/moons and I just recently found two of the coolest websites that I had to share with you. Did you know that there are a few telescopes around the world that will allow you to control them via the internet? You can take pictures of the heavens and these sites will email them to you FOR FREE! It’s true. What’s even better is that you don’t have to be an expert as to what you want to photograph as it’s all laid out for you.

The MicroObservatory allows you to create as many “job orders” as you’d like and their telescopes can take pictures of our nearest neighbor, the moon, or it can even take pictures of galaxies that are thousands of light years away. Obviously the weather plays an important factor on how your photograph will turn out, so the MicroObservatory also gives you weather updates so you can see if tonight’s the perfect night for your job order to take place. I tried taking a photograph of our moon as well as a few planets and I received the photographs within a few business days. They were sent to me via email and were attached as jpeg images. It’s truly awesome.

The second telescope site that you can have take pictures of the heavens is the Bradford Robotic Telescope. Their telescopes have a few more celestial objects that you can photograph and they do take a bit longer for you to receive the photos, but nonetheless it’s free and it’s a really moxie service.

Check them out and let me know how your photos turn out! Please feel free to submit your photo links in the comments below! I’d love to see them!

Milky Way Galaxy (top) and Our Moon (bottom)

I’ve been a recruiter, professionally, for 9 years and I’ve recruited everything from Creative Directors to Designers to Information Technology peeps to Finance people. One of the hottest trends in recruiting is the ability to announce job openings on social media sites. The biggest example is Google. Google’s HR recruitment campaign on YouTube went viral in a less than a week. Companies all across the world are beginning to create profiles on MySpace, Facebook and upload videos to YouTube.

So enough about us HR folk. What I want to discuss is how YOU can find a job by using social media.

The hottest social media site, in my opinion, on the ‘net is Twitter. So how can you use Twitter to find a new job? Easily.

If you think of Twitter as the “center of the ‘net” or as the “watercooler of the net,” (these comments coined by Geekbrief’s @calilewis) then you’ll soon realize the potential of Twitter. It’s easy. It’s quick. It’s instantaneous. You can read 40 people’s “what are you doings” in less than a minute, thanks to Twitter’s 140 character response field. If recruiters spend, on average, less than a minute to brief over a resume then recruiters should love Twitter. And we do.

So if more people are beginning to use Twitter, what better avenue to market yourself and your resume! As a recruiter, my team has begun the social media route in finding the top, best talent. The Monster.com’s of the world are, in all honesty, over-populated with resumes. If I’m looking for a designer who has a love for the web and who knows the latest and greatest in advertising as well as social media, would I find that person more quickly on Monster or on a social medium, such as Twitter or Facebook? To me, it makes perfect sense to use social media sites to attract top-notch talent.

We’ve begun advertising our job openings on Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and MySpace because we know that the talent we’re looking for are going to be more involved in these sites rather than they would be on the regular job boards. All you need is your resume and portfolio online and then you can just broadcast your website on Twitter or follow someone you know who is a recruiter (example: www.twitter.com/imc2recruiter).

Most HR departments these days have created their own MySpace and Facebook profiles. They’re there to not only give more presence to their company but to also “add friends” (aka add potential candidates) to their network.

Should you not upload your resume to the job boards? No, I think you should. But you definitely should think outside the box and begin to use social media sites as well to network. Network, network, network.

Watch the video below to see how companies and recruiters are using social media to find YOU.

http://www.vimeo.com/948866

It’s official my friends and family. A dream of mine has come true. I got to meet Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell (Geekbrief.tv, The Neal Show) at their place and I was a guest on The Neal Show!!!! They are the nicest, sweetest people I’ve met through social media/online and the fact that Geekbrief.tv was my first and most favorite podcast, well this has just come full circle for me.

I can’t begin to explain how grateful I am for not only having a great time with the both of them, but they also spent at least 20 to 30 minutes answering all of my questions and giving me some great insight into my blog and my passion (social media). They’re just as awesome in real life as they are online.

As soon as the episode of The Neal Show gets published, I’ll post the link. Thank you Neal and Cali!!!

Below is just a quick video I made while I was a guest on The Neal Show…. enjoy (for my family!)

http://www.vimeo.com/948401

Cali Lewis, from Geekbrief.tv, just informed all of us viewers about an awesome new technology that, to me, is so moxie I couldn’t help but write about it as well! Publicis and Hal Riney have a new way to surf their site… WITH THE MOTION OF YOUR HANDS! No more touching the keys on your keypad. No more using the mouse to navigate. As long as you have a webcam, you can use the “Air Hands” technology to navigate!

Check out the demo I made while on the site… it’s fantastic and quite moxie!

You will see, at first, the intro to the website where you do a test to make sure your webcam is monitoring your hand signals. Then you’ll see the actual site and me navigating my way (left, right, and top) through it.

Please DIGG this if you think it’s interesting/cool…

http://www.vimeo.com/933053

Today has been a great day for me… I’ve been educated on conserving so many things to help our Earth, I’ve donated money to Nature.org to plant trees in my family and friend’s names and I’ve come across this awesome video, thanks to Will Pate’s blog.  Discovery Channel is one of my favorite channels and this sums up perfectly how I (and I hope you) feel about our Earth!  Fantastic!

I’ve become more and more fascinated with our Earth as well as Space and our Solar System ever since I’ve been a user of the internet.  With the huge number of space exploration videos out there, it can become a tiresome task to find one that really wows you.

Since Earth Day is approaching (April 22nd, 2008) I thought I’d dedicate my blog to educating my readers (as well as myself) on just how unique and wonderful our Earth is.  Where to start?  Here, naturally…