News Corp.’s (NWS) digital chief said Thursday that the company’s social-networking property MySpace is going in a different direction than rival Facebook, based on how its members socialize and share interests.

“Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to,” Jonathan Miller said during a keynote speech at the ad:tech conference in New York. MySpace, in contrast, “is about what people are into.”

MySpace in recent months has said it plans to focus on its appeal as an entertainment portal, where members can connect with their favorite bands and artists, as it has lost ground to status- and news-feed-heavy Facebook.

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Some people go to conferences for the networking, others go for the keynote session and still others, apparently, go for the dancing. Not this year.

One of the highlights of the annual Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., has been Google’s (GOOG) party, known as “Google Dance,” at its Mountain View headquarters. The search giant canceled it this year, however, citing cost-cutting efforts.

“Like most companies are doing these days, we’ve been looking carefully at our expenses and are being more mindful about how we spend our money,” Google spokesman Matt Furman said. “Though we’ve enjoyed hosting the Google Dance in conjunction with SES in past years, we’ve decided not to host it this year.”

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How fitting that in the same week Playboy Enterprises’s longtime CEO Christie Hefner announces her departure, her brand launches an ambitious series of mobisodes. Say what you will about the ups and downs of Playboy, I always admired Hefner’s devotion to digital. To the best of my knowledge, it was the first magazine brand with its own dedicated Web site back in the day. During those early years of Web and tech shows, Hefner keynoted events that the rest of the magazine industry snubbed or parceled out to their entry-level IT staff. At least in theory, she understood that digital was media’s destiny, and she was willing to put some money behind it.

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The security issues we face today in cyberspace are the same ones the country faced during the American Civil War when Abe Lincoln was relying on telegraph transmissions to help keep the country united, a top U.S. cybersecurity official said in a keynote speech at the Black Hat security conference here Thursday.

Lincoln was obsessed with reading telegrams that delivered updates from the battlefield, using them to learn about the military strategies and to offer feedback, said Rod Beckstrom, director of the National Cyber Security Center in the Department of Homeland Security.

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There’s not a lot of hard Apple (AAPL) news for the Street to chew on ahead of Monday’s expected announcement of the 3G iPhone at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. That’s left the Street struggling to figure out something new to say about the yet-to-be-announced new phone that hasn’t already been said. Here’s a brief rundown on what some of the analysts are saying.

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OMG, I can hear the fanboys battling already. Here’s a video from last night’s CES 2008 keynote, Bill Gates’s last for the foreseeable future. And I know it’s scripted, edited and contrived, but I’m sold: The man is a cool geek.

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I’m about 20 rows back in the Palazzo Ballroom waiting for Bill Gates to deliver his eighth consecutive pre-CES keynote, but Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has a front-row seat. He’s next to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, sitting roughly where he was this time last year with MTVN’s Judy McGrath. The keynote–the last for Gates before he moves away from heading Microsoft full-time later this year–has just started…

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