The amount of spam sent by text messages has more than tripled from last year’s level to 45 million messages sent each day. About 92 percent of those are messages are trying to trick people into giving up money.

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The microblogging service said today that it has filed lawsuits in San Francisco Federal Court against several people it said are posting spam or providing tools to create unwanted messages in violation of its rules.

The spam issue has continued to grow along with Twitter, which now has 140 million active users posting some 340 million tweets per day.

“As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers,” Twitter said in a blog post. “While spam is a small fraction of the incredible content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be.”

The company continues to try engineering tactics to thwart spammers, but anyone who has tweeted about an iPad or iPhone can tell those efforts alone are not stopping the problem.

“With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” Twitter said. “By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

Last year, the nation’s top 100 retailers by e-commerce revenue sent recipients an average of 177 emails apiece, up 87% from 2007, according to research by marketing-technology company Responsys Inc. Some of the most aggressive emailers — including Neiman Marcus Group Inc. — sent each recipient more than 500 emails apiece in 2011, Responsys said.

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Here’s a year-end recap app that could actually be useful: ToutApp analyzes your email throughout the course of the year and provides data on your busiest month, day of the week and time of day for email exchanges. It also tells you who you email the most, who you receive the most emails from, and which marketers send the most emails.

An application that analyzes your email accounts may seem like a huge waste of time, but the purpose of ToutApp is to make users more aware of what their email patterns are so they could, theoretically, be more efficient with their time. According to Pingdom, 107 trillion emails were sent worldwide last year, up from 90 trillion in 2009; an average of 294 billion emails are sent per day.

ToutApp can take some time to work, depending on the size of your inbox. It took a couple hours for the ToutApp to scan my entire Gmail inbox — around 15,000 emails — and it eventually revealed that I receive more emails than I send. I also learned that January of this year was my busiest month in terms of email traffic (I’m going to unscientifically pin that one on the annual Consumer Electronics Show, which probably upset the average), and that I send the most emails between 8 pm and 9 pm — which makes me a fantastic dinner date. ToutApp also listed individuals as well as circles of people I email with the most, and highlighted key words that often appear in my email.

Some of the data, such as the list of emails from marketers, could be channeled into usefulness. And ToutApp’s analysis says I received hundreds of Facebook notification emails this year, which reminded me that I should probably disable “Notifications,” as that would help declutter my inbox.

But other info — such as the fact that “FW” is a key word that often appears in my emails — didn’t tell me much, except that I get a lot of forwarded mail.

ToutApp only works on Gmail accounts, and in order for it to work, you have to allow it access to your Gmail account. The company is not affiliated with Google, and it says says that during the analysis process it will not have access to your password or any other personal info through your Google account.

Google’s information section on third-party access says the data and activities available to third-party sites, like the ToutApp, depend on the Google product;, some apps may not be able to add or modify data or may be able to see a small portion of data. (To unsubscribe after your ToutApp report is generated, you can go to Authorizing Applications & Sites under the My Account area in Gmail, and revoke access.)

ToutApp comes from a San Francisco-based start-up that offers email management services for business owners. According to its Web site, Tout is backed by venture capitalists Esther Dyson, Dave McClure and Eric Ries, along with other angel investors and seed-stage firms.

If you’re looking for apps that dissect non-Gmail accounts, a research group from the MobiSocial laboratory at Stanford University has created something called MUSE, or Memories Using Email, that works to analyze and chart your exchanges across different email accounts. There’s also something called Topalt Reports for analyzing email through Microsoft Outlook.

The order, which was handed down by a federal district court judge in New York on Monday, resolves a lawsuit filed in 2008. The judge found the defendants liable as participants in a conspiracy under New York common law.

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I don’t know how to say this any other way, so I’ll be direct: Please stop with the spam.

I’m talking about crud like this, which you left in the comments of one of my stories:

Personally I’m done with Netflix. They became too much of a hassle, too confusing, and with the price hike, kind of expensive for what I was getting out of it. I have the Blockbuster Movie Pass now, and I like it a lot more. Now I realize I could be called biased since I’m a long time subscriber — and more recently an employee — of DISH Network, but Blockbuster costs less, at $10 a month, and includes streaming to my receiver and computer, DVD’s, Blu-rays and video games (which lets me cancel my Gamefly account too, saving me more money), plus 20 movie channels. And it’s all on the same bill so it’s easier too. So for me it’s a no-brainer.

Now, this pitch, written by “Andrew_K_Anderson,” does disclose that “Andrew” works for you guys. And it’s on a post about Netflix and Dish and Blockbuster and that new rental service you’re launching. So it wouldn’t seem like a completely obvious piece of spam, except that “Andrew” left the comment yesterday. And I wrote this post back on Sept. 23.

Who leaves comments on two-month-old posts? Sometimes it’s a bona fide reader who just happened across something they’ve never seen before. More often it’s a spammer.

In this case, Disqus, the commenting system we use at AllThingsD, makes it quite easy to figure out that “Andrew” is the latter. Because it tells me that “Andrew” leaves the same kind of comment on sites all over the Web.

Here’s another one he left yesterday, on SlashGear:

Now that I’ve had some time with both services, I have to say that I like the Blockbuster Movie Pass a great deal more. It simply provides more options. There’s no additional charges for Blu-rays, you can rent games (a huge bonus in my book) …

Etc.

I don’t know what else “Andrew” does for you, but he was sort of busy yesterday. He left the same comment, taking time to tweak each one by just a few words — I gather this was to defeat the Disqus spam filter — on six other sites, too: The Atlantic; VentureBeat; CNNMoney; the Washington Examiner; and two Time.com sites.

This wasn’t a one-day binge for “Andrew.” Disqus tells me he’s left 188 comments using the same account and, as far as I can tell, they’re all promotional pitches for Dish, Blockbuster, etc. Last month, for instance, he found a four-year-old blog post complaining about Dish competitor DirecTV, and chimed in on that one.

So who is “Andrew”? Disqus tells me he signed in to their system using the name “Ender Chadwick” and a Dish Network email address. Somebody on Facebook named “Ender Chadwick” says he works at Dish, so maybe it’s that guy.

But who knows. Andrew/Ender signed on using an IP address owned by Dish. It’s the same one used by people named “Rose” and “Monica” to write Dish love letters, too, as Gizmo Lovers pointed out last month.

And this gets to one of the reasons this stuff is such a downer: Look at all the calories burned on this petty little exercise, on both sides of the equation. What a waste.

I asked Dish about this yesterday, expecting them to explain that whoever was leaving this stuff probably wasn’t a Dish/Blockbuster employee. Maybe an over-zealous contractor, and that “the wires had gotten a little crossed.”

That’s what Blockbuster marketing head Kevin Lewis told me back in September, when I asked him about a story that seemed to involve the Blockbuster Twitter account offering a free year’s subscription to people who would tweet about dumping Netflix. (I wasted a bunch of time and energy on that one, too. Never bothered to post it. Glad I kept my notes!)

But Dish PR head Marc Lumpkin didn’t try to apologize for Andrew/Ender/whomever, at all.

“We require our employees who post about DISH products to identify themselves as a DISH Network employee,” Lumpkin told me via email. “This appears to be an informative posting describing the options consumers have for getting entertainment and is posted in a discussion of a similar topic.”

Really? I asked. You sure you want me to print that?

“It looks informative to me and appropriate for those Web site discussions. I’m fine with the response.”

Okay. So, Marc, Kevin, Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton, et al. — we don’t really need to spell out why this isn’t “informative” or “appropriate,” right? Because we don’t need to explain why you shouldn’t show up at funerals for people you don’t know and hand out flyers for term life insurance, either. Right?

But think about it this way: Stuffing BS comments onto Web sites is the kind of thing that low-rent scammers do. You? You’re a big, publicly traded company. You have 14 million satellite TV subscribers, a left-for-dead video-rental brand you want to revive, and big plans to launch a new Web TV service.

That’s a whole lot to take care of. And spending time and money on tacky, clumsy astroturf seems like it won’t help, and could probably hurt. This article, for instance, doesn’t go in the “win” column, right?

Meanwhile! Here’s “Explosion,” by Eli “Paperboy” Reed, which I learned about from your newest ad campaign. It’s great. More of this, please.

[Image credit: Christina Richards/Shutterstock (litter crew);
Wikimedia (Sisyphus)]

The issue, which first started appearing on Facebook pages a couple days ago according to ZDNet, has generated a growing wave of revulsion online as some users took to Twitter to complain of graphic and lurid imagery that goes far beyond ordinary porn.

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Facebook has launched a major redesign for games, bringing back some viral components that were turned off after users complained about random alerts cluttering their news feeds.

The updates were announced Thursday evening, just hours after Google unveiled its games network that offers game makers a larger cut of the revenues than Facebook does.

Facebook’s new features will likely be favorable to developers, who are constantly looking for new ways to get players to discover their games, but it’s questionable how the social network’s audience will react.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook shut off developers’ ability to post messages to people’s walls — messages that asked friends to help look for their lost cow or plow their crops. When users complained, Facebook cracked down significantly, which made it much more difficult for developers to find new players for their games.

Meanwhile, Google announced today that it is trying hard to contain all game activities to a particular tab under a user’s profile to steer clear of ever being accused of spamming a person’s communication flow.

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product for Google+, told me that there’s a name for unwanted solicitations: Spam.

“We do not want to inundate you with things that are not relevant,” he added.

It seems that Facebook is now looking for some middle ground to give developers another way to find new consumers.

In a blog post, Facebook said its began rolling out a new ranking system with the goal of only surfacing relevant items to friends, including “high quality content from apps.”

Messages will even appear in the feed of a person who doesn’t already use the app.

Apparently some of the responsibility will fall on the users to determine what they end up seeing. For instance, apps that post content which results in high usage will be posted more often; conversely, apps that have content “that is frequently hidden or marked as spam” will be posted less often.

Given that users will have to manually participate in marking alerts, it’s hard to understand how this does not represent a reinstatement of the social network’s old viral channels that people loved to loathe.

Beyond reinstating some viral components, Facebook users will also notice other obvious changes, like a live ticker of real-time game-related updates; bookmarks, where users can select their favorite apps; and leaderboard-type features, where users can post achievements and scores to make game play more competitive.

Another major update will give developers the ability to expand the size of their games so people can expand the game to the full screen of their browser.

Today, Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations in its second-quarter earning, growing revenue and lessening losses.

The Santa Monica, Calif., online content maker also announced that it had re-upped and expanded its advertising partnership with Google and also bought two start-ups in social media and advertising.

Now, it’s time for the inevitable conference call to explain it all to Wall Street analysts and the media.

2:02 pm PT: The call starts off with an unusually jaunty CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who quickly got to the real deal: Exactly how badly did Google’s changes to its search algorithm, under a program code-named Panda, hurt Demand’s content business?

Not much, says Rosenblatt, who reels off a list of things the company has done to improve its offerings, which have been dinged by many as, well, spam.

Rosenblatt was not having any of that, talking about removing 300,000 pieces of crappy content and also “quality improvements” with partners such as cheerily demented cooking goddess Rachael Ray. She might cook with spam — here is a delightful Spam Hawaiian recipe — but she ain’t spam!

2:13 pm: Now it is on to the acquisition of IndieClick. Essentially: It’s for the young people.

Then, international. Latin America Demand editorial via eHow en español! (Actually, the acquisition of Emergincast.com, an Argentine start-up. Coming soon to a blog site near you: ¿Cómo se hierve el agua?

Last, social media. Demand will be doing a lot more of it, like everyone else in the world, including more recommendations. I would really like it if some Internet company said it was going anti-social.

2:18 pm: The finance guy comes on, covering everything already in the press releases. Which is why I am cutting out here and getting a gluten-free doughnut at the Whole Foods store where I am writing this post.

It is as delicious as you might imagine a gluten-free doughnut can be. Which is to say: Not very!

2:32 pm: Q&A time from the Wall Street dudes — and, let it be said, they are all dudes.

The first question is about the “cleansing” of its cruddy content and if it is all flushed out.

It might be baked-on sludge, but Rosenblatt assures that Demand has it all figured out.

Then, a query about international and how the company decides what to pick. Algo, of course! And local content writers.

Back to the spam content: Does the need to have better content mean less of it? Kind of, since there is a lot more video. But still a lot of content churning out of Demand!

A question about Facebook and how to program Demand content into it. Good lord, it’s hyper-poking!

“It’s not clear the best way of how you expand into all these properties,” said Rosenblatt, specifically referring to its acquisition today of both IndieClick and RSS Graffiti.

The next question is how successful Demand is in the display and brand business, and how IndieClick, a premium ad company aimed at niche blogs, will be integrated in.

More on social media advertising’s future. Aaaghh, this is as obvious as a store-bought-crust apple pie baked by Rachael Ray.

Rosenblatt notes that its flagship site, eHow, is but one means of distribution, but Demand content is going all over the place and winging by people when they least expect it.

“Social is more effective … to try to find stuff you didn’t know that you needed,” says Rosenblatt, who also would not dis search as a means of discovery.

That’s important, since Google is a major traffic driver and advertising partner, when it is not terrorizing Demand and others with its search algo version of Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor Snape.

And presto, here comes a question about Demand’s Google ad relationship, which Rosenblatt touts nicely.

Of course he does. It’s tastier than spam, after all.

Vitrue has a somewhat expansive definition of spam, including swearing, derogatory comments and inappropriate promotional material.

The Atlanta-based company says it measured average monthly growth of 8.6 percent in spam on Facebook as a percentage of all fan posts and 0.4 percent growth in spam as a percentage of fan comments between Dec. 2009 and Oct. 2010.

Facebook itself has improved spam tools for page administrators in recent months, helping them more easily ban users, report spam and build blocked word lists.

Facebook spokesperson Fred Wolens strongly disputed the Vitrue claims, saying that Facebook’s requirement for real names makes it far less spammy than email or traditional comment systems. “A fraction of a fraction of a percent of users are affected on any given day by spam,” Wolens said.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Jim Bankoff, the fomer AOL exec responsible for buying Engadget for the Internet portal, has grabbed eight staffers who had recently left the huge tech site amid tensions, in order to start a new gadget property.

The site–which is still unnamed and will be run by outgoing Engadget Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky–will debut sometime in the fall. It is the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C. sports news site SB Nation, which is helmed by Bankoff.

“The technology we built is applicable beyond sports,” said Bankoff, in an interview with BoomTown tonight. “It was an opportunity to apply our model…into another content category where there was an overlap in demographics.”

That would be fanboys and, well, boys-who-will-be-boys.

UPDATE: In related news, sources said that AOL has zeroed in on Tim Stevens, Engadget’s automotive editor to replace the outgoing Topolsky. The New York-based company had already named Darren Murph as its new managing editor.

Now Stevens will be competing with Topolsky, as well as managing editor Nilay Patel, who will also lead the Engadget tech-exodus (techxodus?). The others include former Engadget staffers Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Ross Miller, Chris Ziegler, Justin Glow and Dan Chilton.

Stern and Ziegler are still on Engadget’s editors site as current employees.

All of the above had left Engadget in a series of departures of late, all due to increasing unhappiness with AOL’s management and content strategy.

Paul Miller and Ross Miller, who are not related, both stated publicly that they did not like the editorial direction AOL was going in, especially a controversial content strategy document titled “The AOL Way.”

In his blog post, Topolsky threw another smackadoo at AOL, noting “SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on.”

New AOL content head Arianna Huffington has shifted toward a more journalistic path, but the talent bleed began before AOL’s $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post.

In a blog post, which is embedded below, Topolsky said the new SB Nation gadget site will be similar in pace and topic, but it will be broader than Engadget.

The move is an interesting one for SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

It had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

In related news, also restarting tomorrow will be a popular gadget podcast that Topolsky, Patel and Paul Miller had done for Engadget.

The New York Times’ David Carr mentioned the new site in the middle of a column earlier tonight.

Here is Topolsky’s blog post on the move, titled “This Is My Next Project”:

As you may have already heard (or read), there’s some activity going on in the world of Joshua Topolsky. Earlier this evening, David Carr published a piece in the New York Times about a new project that I’m embarking on…and I want to just say a few things about it.

Firstly: yes, this is happening. I’ve decided to join the team at SB Nation to build something brand new in the tech space. Now I know it might seem odd to some that I would be partnering with a sports publisher to build a technology news site, but that’s only half the story. This isn’t just about sports, or tech, or lone silos. What we will build together at SB Nation is a new media company–buoyed by the absolutely incredible work SB Nation has already done in publishing–and part of that new media company will be the as-yet-unnamed gadget and technology site that I’ll be working over the next few months to create. When we launch (hopefully in the fall), I will be editor-in-chief of a property that I hope will inform, entertain, and engage fans of technology in whole new ways.

I should say that I wouldn’t want to build something like this alone, and thankfully, I won’t have to. I’ll be joined by some very good friends at this new venture–people like Nilay Patel, for instance.

Of course, the natural question I’m sure a lot of people have is: why SB Nation? The easy answer is that the people at SB Nation share my vision of what publishing looks like in the year 2011. They think that the technology used to create and distribute news on the web (and mobile) is as important as the people who are responsible for the content itself. And that’s not just pillow talk–SB Nation is actively evolving its tools and processes to meet the growing and changing needs of its vast editorial teams and their audience communities. They’re building for the web as it is now. From the perspective of a journalist who also happens to be a huge nerd, that’s a match made in heaven. SBN isn’t just another media company pushing news out–it’s a testbed and lab for some of the newest and most interesting publishing tools I’ve ever seen. In short, I was blown away when I saw what kind of technology they’re using to get news on their front page and engage audiences, and even more blown away when I started talking to them about what could come next.

But beyond the technology (and possibly more important than the technology), there’s another factor here that’s driving my decision. It’s that SB Nation believes in real, independent journalism and the potential for new media to serve as an answer and antidote to big publishing houses and SEO spam–a point we couldn’t be more aligned on. This is a group of people that not only think independent media works, but are reaping the rewards of new publishing done right. As the fastest growing online sports publisher, they’re seen as a source for credible and honest journalism, which is why industry stalwarts like Rob Neyer have recently joined their ranks (ranks which include hundreds of talented sports experts). This isn’t tabloid page grabbing or content farming–it’s news and insight by and for a passionate and informed group of people. And that’s exactly where I want to be.

So, what happens next? We get to work.

In the coming months I’m going to be laser focused on one thing: building the best tech site in the world–and I would love to hear what you guys think the next phase in technology and gadget news should look like. Ping me with ideas, gripes, or even better–come and work here! SB Nation is looking for new developers as we speak, and as we ramp up to launch, we’ll be bringing on lots of talent to work both on the front page and behind the scenes.

I couldn’t be more excited and enthusiastic about what we can build right now, and I can’t wait to share what we’re going to make with the rest of the world. The months ahead are going to be filled with lots of early mornings and sleepless nights, intense debates, triumphs, and trials–and I can’t wait.

But people who click on those links activate malicious code that is embedded in their personal computers. According to Satnam Narang, a threat analyst with Internet security firm M86, the code not only turns the infected computer into a drone that can be used by hackers to send more spam in the future, but also tricks people into paying $49 for fake anti-virus software.

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Botnets like Rustock use malicious code to string together hundreds of thousands of personal computers that are then used to send spam email without knowledge of their owners. In the case of Rustock, infected computers were managed by a fleet of 26 separate “command and control” servers that sent them instructions.

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I’ve never logged onto Facebook before but I hear it’s nice. In terms of e-mail, Facebook has it built in.

Former “spam king” Robert Soloway, who has spent the last three years and eight months away from his computer while serving a federal prison sentence. Soloway, who was released last week, sent out 10 trillion emails during a 10-year spam career. Probation officers will monitor his computer use for the next three years.

Yahoo’s Luke Beatty said he is not worried.

“We welcome the change,” he insisted about Google taking aim last Friday at so-called “content farms,” producers of low-quality content that spam up the Web and the search giant’s results. “And we endorse what Google is doing 100 percent.”

That’s ironic, given among those allegedly hit hardest by changing of its famous algorithm–based on early, and perhaps questionable, surveys–is Yahoo’s Associated Content.

But, if true, and traffic at Associated Content–which the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought for $90 million last May–is indeed badly hurt, it’s obviously going to be a problem for Yahoo, which relies on advertising revenue as its core business.

A quick poll by Sistrix, a search engine optimization firm, using one million keywords before and after Google’s changes, showed that Associated Content’s “visibility index”– including keyword and ranking positions ranking and clickthrough rate–was down 93 percent.

So yesterday, Beatty, who founded Associated Content and now works at Yahoo, dialed up BoomTown to talk about what the Google shift will mean to Yahoo.

First off in the wide-ranging interview, he noted, “everything on the Web is changing all the time,” noting that Associated Content used to rely more on the now weakened Digg and RSS for its traffic and distribution.

“Obviously, that has changed and we have still managed to grow,” he said.

Beatty said it is still not clear that the new tweaks in search criteria at Google would mean for Associated Content’s offerings–coming from 400,000 contributors of all kinds.

“Our data will not be reconciled for weeks…but some will be up and some will be down,” he said, adding the overall, “I suspect it will be down, although it’s not accurate by any means in the numbers released so far, since there is no way you can know this early.”

Still, it’s obvious that Google’s latest move has not been not good for Associated Content, although Beatty noted that the Silicon Valley search king is no longer the main source of traffic for Associated Content material.

Instead, that would be the owned-and-operated sites of Yahoo, most of all, and–increasingly–social networking sites such as Facebook.

“When we sold the company, we know that sites of Yahoo itself would be the biggest driver of our growth and that was the plan,” said Beatty. “And, though smaller, social means of distribution are clearly the way people are now finding our content.”

In an email later, Beatty underscored this point:

“Search traffic is not our focus within Yahoo–it hasn’t been for 10
months…traffic sources have changed endlessly over that last six years…search is one, albeit an important one and clearly, [but] now it too is changing and we see the future of our content distribution coming from O&O properties and social networks, as much as anything.”

Still, Beatty said Associated Content will adapt as long as Google does not make its tweaks on a network basis and rather than on a site basis. (Interestingly, that would presumably include Google’s own–and often spammish–Blogger property, which is fueled by its powerful AdSense engine.)

“It appears that changes have been made on an asset-by-asset basis
is good–networkwide cramdown would be inappropriate and uneducated,” he said.

Still, the best way to fight the Google initiative is by delivering higher quality content, which Beatty said was being done at the company via a series of ongoing measures to improve overall submissions.

Those include a Yahoo style guide for content creators, a two-tiered human editor review process, analytical analysis, a featured contributor program and, interesting, an online tutorial process called the Yahoo Contributor Network.

It’s not exactly Harvard University, of course, but Beatty said there is more to come.

“We are committed to supporting and helping our contributors navigate through this and every other change in the crowdsourced content economy,” he said. “We want the best article to get more traffic.”

Of course, with Google’s doubtlessly continuing changes in its criteria for what good content is, presumably, that won’t be Yahoo’s to decide.

In another significant search announcement yesterday, Google said it was revising its algorithm to target makers of low-quality content.

The search giant has been criticized by many of late for the presence of too much spam in its results, which degrades the consumer experience on the powerful site.

Thus, “pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking–a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries,” said Google in a blog post.

The company continued:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality site–sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

Who Google is aiming at is unclear–some point to Demand Media, whose top exec recently said the content company welcomed any improvements to the search results in its recent quarterly call.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who has often touted the Demand’s good relations with Google, to a question from a Wall Street analyst about the series of recent declarations by Google to clean up its search results.

That was further underscored yesterday.

Interestingly, the Google post about the changes, titled “Finding More High-Quality Sites,” was authored by Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts–who have cut a high profile of late in the search arena.

Both Singhal and Cutts were quite vocal recently in loopy accusations about Microsoft’s Bing lifting Google’s search results.

And Cutts has been a frequent visitor to Washington, D.C. of late, to defend Google over its controversial acquisition of the ITA Software flight information company, as well as its search ranking process.

At a January 13 meeting, in an email obtained by BoomTown, Cutts was the draw:

Please join us!

You’re invited to learn

How Google’s Search Engine Works

Myth-busting and Q&A for House/Senate staff members

with

Matt Cutts

Principal Search Engineer, Google

Thursday, January 13, 2011

2:30 – 3:30 PM

House Visitor Center Room 201

How does Google’s search engine really work? Can websites pay Google to improve their ranking in Google results? What’s the difference between the “natural” results and the ads on the right hand side? And why does a particular website rank #1 or #3 when you do a Google search for your boss’ name? You’re invited to join Matt Cutts, one of Google’s top search engine engineers and the company’s ambassador to webmasters for a session on Capitol Hill where Matt will explain how Google ranks websites, address common myths about Google’s search results, and answer your questions. Please join us!

In another invite, low-quality content was the topic:

Matt Cutts is one of Google’s top search engineers who heads up the team ensuring that spam and low-quality sites don’t game search results. He is going to be here in DC to talk with folks around town about some of the recent calls for government to police or regulate the “fairness” of search results. Matt is a bit of a rock star in the search world and spends a lot of time speaking and blogging about these issues. Basically he’ll talk about how Google goes about ranking websites, how his team fights webspam, and he’ll provide a closer look at sites like Foundem and MyTriggers (who have filed antitrust actions against Google).

Finally, he’ll talk about the recent calls by some for Google’s search results to be regulated.

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but the noisy search algorithm changes, while welcome to those using Google, also have a pretty clear goal to burnish the Silicon Valley company’s image.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Perusing AOL’s leaked damn-the-journalism-full-speed-ahead business plan, BoomTown was a little late to the Microsoft Bing event this morning called “Farsight: Beyond the Search Box.”

But things had certainly been cooking with gas when I walked into the meeting room at the University of San Francisco, which the organizers had decked out in white nubby rugs, white pleather couches and those white egg-shaped chairs found only in 1970s decor.

Schweeet!

First up was well-known investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, poo-poohing Microsoft’s prospects of ever making money in search.

“It’s difficult to produce a new search company,” said Thiel, noting that even with a growing market share it’s curtains for Bing, given the huge fixed costs. “As far as I can tell, it’s still not breaking even.”

Ouch!

By the way, Thiel sold semantic search engine Powerset to Microsoft for upward of $100 million in 2008 to help it, you know, get ahead in search.

Way to insult your money-bearing hosts!

Then, moderator Vivek Wadhwa harangued the panelists from Google, Microsoft and Blekko in the session “Who Will Win the Spam Wars?”

And they say I’m a snarky moderator! Wadhwa is snarktastic!

Wadhwa did not like any of it–not crappy content sites that sully Web search, not the efforts the companies were making to fix things, not the vision the trio had of the future.

And, by the way, Microsoft was not ever going to make money off all the company’s efforts.

Way to insult your hosts! I like this event!

Of course, what everyone was interested in was a smackdown between Google and Microsoft, given that the search giant accused the software giant of stealing its results today.

In an excellent, if exhaustive, post by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, Google said Bing was cheating by lifting its search results, which Google said it had proved via a “honeypot” sting operation.

“I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” Google’s Amit Singhal told Search Engine Land. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

The very presence of the word “honeypot” in any story about search algorithms is superb, in my book, even though this “controversy” is pretty much a he-said-he-said geek-off.

Google’s Matt Cutts kept up the cheater pressure at the Bing event, in a short debate with Microsoft’s Harry Shum, who was not having any of it.

“It’s not like we actually copy anything,” he said.

Translation: Actually, we do borrow, just like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did to the Winklevii, resulting in a social networking behemoth that will soon take over all search and make this whole debate moot.

Microsoft is rubber, Google is glue. And Facebook, which was not present at the search event, is the real sticky honeypot.

I’ve taken a quick tour and can report that it’s more or less what you would expect: A filtered stream of tweets about next week’s Packers-Steelers game. Quite astutely, the biggest emphasis on the opening page is on tweets from NFL players themselves, who have embraced the platform even as the league has struggled to make sense of it.

And there are also some cool graphics that show off trending Super Bowl topics, sorted by time, geography, etc. I’m a little surprised to see Steelers talk so widespread throughout the country, but I guess that’s just my Midwestern bias poking through. (Seriously. Everyone’s rooting for Aaron Rodgers, right?)

Twitter did something similar last summer for the World Cup, but that effort didn’t seem to have been thought through very well, and very quickly became overwhelmed with spam and random chatter. I have a hunch Twitter has worked some of that out this time.

Also worth noting is that in the past, this kind of site might have had a hard time attracting much attention, but now Twitter’s ad platform can give it a real shot in the arm: A link to the site is today’s “Promoted Trend.”

Again, be wary of reading too much into any stock’s performance on any given day. But it seems safe to draw at least one conclusion: Investors aren’t freaked out about Demand’s symbiosis with/dependence on Google. Even after a puzzling blog post from the search giant last week.

The post, written by Google engineer Matt Cutts, defended the search engine’s performance against a chorus of criticism. But it acknowledged that Google was paying attention to complaints about “content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content” clogging its search results.

Lots of people logically assumed that Google/Cutts was talking about Demand, although the post never mentioned the company by name. And if Google, which supplies 28 percent of Demand’s revenue and a big slug of its traffic, has a problem with Demand…

But Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt insists that Cutts wasn’t talking about his company at all. In fact, he says, Demand and Google are getting along just great, in a relationship that pays out real dividends for both parties. It looks like investors believe him.

I chatted with Rosenblatt about the Google post, and the companies’ relationship, yesterday at Demand’s New York outpost. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:

Peter Kafka: Do you think that Google post was directed at you in any way?

Richard Rosenblatt: It’s not directed at us in any way.

Did you talk to them about that?

I can’t comment on that.

Okay. But they wrote this post, which talks about content farms, and even though you say they weren’t talking about you, it left a lot of people scratching their heads.

Let’s just say that we know what they’re trying to do. Last year, they put out three major changes. They put out Mayday–that was going specifically after spammers and low-quality content. Our traffic increased when they did that. The reason why is our content is being scraped and stolen, [because we're] the largest content producer. So they’re looking for original, non-duplicated, human-made content. That’s all our content. So if they were targeting us, you’d also see Wikipedia, About.com, Wikihow, every person that makes more than a few dozen articles….Our traffic went up.

Second one: They did something called Caffeine, to increase the [search] index. Our traffic went up.

They then did Google Instant. Our traffic went up.

So the three things [Cutts] talks about in his blog post did not adversely affect us. You can draw your own conclusions.

The post talks about going after spammers and content farms. But when you guys think of content farms, you don’t think that means Demand, right? You’re thinking of people who take my copy or your copy, and cut and paste it, and tweak it enough to fool Google.

He’s talking about duplicate, non-original content. Every single piece of ours is original. Written by somebody. And I understand how that could confuse some people, because of that stupid “content farm” label, which we got tagged with. I don’t know who ever invented it, and who tagged us with it, but that’s not us…We keep getting tagged with “content farm”. [Ahem.] It’s just insulting to our writers. We don’t want our writers to feel like they’re part of a “content farm.”

So can you sum up your relationship with Google today?

This is why our partnership with Google makes sense. 1) We help them fill the gaps in their index, where they don’t have quality content. 2) We’re the largest supplier of all video to YouTube, over two billion views and 3) we’re a large AdSense partner. So our relationship is synergistic, and it’s a great partnership. And it’s a partnership that we’re excited to continue to expand.

The company will soon give all users the option to use Facebook entirely over HTTPS, and recommends they do so if they use public Internet access points. It will also show members social captchas for authentication–where they must identify a few of their Facebook friends’ faces–whenever suspicious activity is detected on an account.

Facebook warned in a blog post that using HTTPS will slow down the site and isn’t compatible with all features, including some externally developed Facebook applications. It will roll out HTTPS access “slowly over the next few weeks” via its settings page, the company said.

Facebook still faces other ongoing security problems, such as spam, virus messages and wall posts. CTO Bret Taylor said yesterday the company had cut platform spam by 95 percent in 2010, but I believe he was referring to notifications and posts from applications, especially social games. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public fan page was apparently hacked into yesterday and has since been taken down.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Taylor said Facebook will emphasize HTML5 development in order to have maximum impact across fragmented mobile platforms for both his company and those who build on the Facebook platform.

HTML5–which is the new browser standard that gives Web applications capabilities on par with native applications–Taylor said, “might be a little ahead of that curve, but that’s where we’re putting a huge amount of investment in the next year.”

Already, said Taylor, 125 million of Facebook’s 200 million-plus mobile users are using HTML5-capable devices like the iPhone and Android.

Even so, when Facebook introduces a new feature, it has to implement it across seven different versions: facebook.com, m.facebook.com, touch.facebook.com, its iPhone app, Android app, BlackBerry app and custom integrations for other handset OSs.

Facebook wants to reduce that friction for its own sake and its developers’ as well. The company’s first step toward this goal was its single sign-on for mobile apps introduced last year, which has already had significant impact on developers like Flixster, Taylor said.

Facebook’s HTML5 push brings it into step with Google, which has put a major emphasis on Web apps despite its own Android mobile OS. But even so, the two companies have had major success with native apps, when they’ve chosen to build them. Facebook has the No. 1 free iPhone app of all time, while Google Mobile for iPhone is No. 3. (Coming in second is Pandora’s streaming radio.)

“Mobile devices are inherently social,” said Taylor, noting that he feels that the combination of mobile, social and location will be an especially fruitful area for products like Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Taylor said Facebook is likely to create its own “high-quality location database”–which would compete with start-ups like SimpleGeo–though it’s not something the company has specific plans for yet.

Addressing start-ups wary of Facebook competing with their products by making them a part of its platform, Taylor said, “Our philosophy has always been to build products into Facebook that are generally useful, which is why we built location into the platform. We felt like it would have a really big impact for developers if they could all leverage a common location infrastructure.”

Facebook’s platform focus in 2010 was about improving user experience, Taylor said, and he considers that effort a success. He said Facebook reduced spam (a.k.a. unwanted posts about games like FarmVille and other applications) by 95 percent last year through policy simplifications.

Though it shut down ways for applications to recruit users, it wasn’t like Facebook prevented games from growing, said Taylor, citing the fantastic ascent of Zynga’s CityVille, which grew to 100 million users in 40 days, compared with the four years it took Facebook itself to reach that number.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

All the security attention paid in recent years to securing the Windows desktop and the applications running on it have paid off a little, Cisco found, making it harder for computer scammers to successfully carry off their intended crimes on that platform. The trouble is they’re now starting to focus more attention on mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, and devices running Google’s Android operating system, Cisco said.

Meanwhile, the overall global volume of spam, which often contains troublemaking links that are used to deliver attacks, decreased for the first time ever in 2010. Even so, spam still increased in some developed countries where broadband connections are multiplying. In the United Kingdom, spam volume nearly doubled, while the volume in France went up 115 percent. The U.S. saw a slight decline–11.1 trillion messages down from 11.3 trillion in 2009. Spam in Brazil, China and Turkey also declined. Some of the decline can be attributed to last year’s arrest by FBI agents in Milwaukee of a Russian accused of being the “king of spam,” and to the shutdown of a few botnets used by scammers to send spam.

One thing about Cisco’s report that’s likely to draw some attention is its finding that the raw number of vulnerabilities on Apple products appear to be growing. Apple users are usually pretty sensitive about this topic, and any comparison of the Mac to Windows on the security front tends to make them grind their teeth and pound out annoyed comments on tech blogs. I know because I’ve done the same teeth-grinding and have in the past criticized other reports for similar findings.

Here Cisco is addressing vulnerabilities that Apple has itself documented and patched in software updates. One thing that’s not clear to me–though it sure looks like it–is whether Cisco is combining vulnerabilities found on both iOS (iPhone and iPad) and OS X (the Mac). The data it’s using is from its IntelliShield service, which tracks vulnerabilities and security incidents, and shows that over five years Apple’s vulnerabilities rose, from less than 200 in 2006 to more than 350 in 2010. That rate was higher than Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco itself, the report found, though it goes on to say that Apple has worked harder than most other vendors to protect its users. Security is one of the reasons Apple imposes such strict rules on what’s available in the App store, though people still jailbreak their phones.

Another trend Cisco found is something called “money muling.” Tom Gillis, VP and general manager of Cisco’s Security business unit, describes money muling as using unsuspecting people who are attracted by “work at home” spam messages and Web ads to participate in money laundering by moving small amounts of money into bank accounts, just a few thousand dollars at a time. He says the operations around this are becoming increasingly elaborate, and criminals will devote a lot of effort to developing it this year.

I talked with Gillis about the report and other security trends that Cisco found. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

NewEnterprise: So you’re seeing fewer attacks on Windows and more on mobile devices. Is that simply because there are more of them?

Tom Gillis: It’s the simple fact that there’s this new class of mobile device coming into the enterprise that used to be a phone and now it’s a computer, and it can access enterprise information. So what we’re seeing is that the raw number, but not the severity, is down on Windows. Part of this is that Windows 7 was a very good release on Microsoft’s part from a security standpoint. And we’ve got these new devices coming into the enterprise, and so we’re seeing a shift in focus of attacks on these mobile devices. They’re vulnerable to attack and they’re relevant in the enterprise. Two years ago this would have been too small a population to be meaningful.

What kind of attacks are you seeing?

It varies. In some cases there’s a little “phone home” code in a free gaming app. Pretty gentle stuff so far. But as people start using smartphones to access sensitive information we need to start thinking about security considerations on these devices. There’s a larger theme here that the whole nature of attacks is changing dramatically. The fact that spam volumes dropped at all is a big tell. For 10 years this has only gone up. We’re not forecasting a steady decline in spam, but the fact that it slowed down at all is an indicator of the shift in the way that attackers are using email. The attacks are more targeted and personal, for one thing.

Can’t some of this decrease be attributed to some of the arrests that happened last year?

It can. There’s been a handful of arrests. And they went after not only the botnet operators but other parts of the spam value chain. There are firms and entities that build botnets of compromised machines that relay the spam, and then there are other firms and entities that rent time on those botnets that do the merchandising. The biggest category is selling fake pharmaceuticals. Some of these fake pharma operations were shut down and the people associated with them arrested. It’s not an easy thing to do, because they’re global, they move around, and so to make an arrest in this space is a huge accomplishment.

So what is the thinking now about securing the mobile device?

We think there are two ways to make mobile devices work in the enterprise. The flood of devices into the enterprise is huge, and everyone wants to use them to check their email and access corporate directories and other fundamental things. There needs to be some kind of software on the end point–the phone or device. It will have to be light. You can’t have some kind of antivirus suite running on the phone. It would be a little piece of software that’s on all the time that knows when you’re behind the corporate firewall and when you’re not, and manages your connection accordingly. We bought a company called ScanSafe that has 40 data centers around the world. When you’re outside the firewall it connects to you the nearest data center and enforces your corporate policies, but all you as the user know is that it just works. This notion of being on or off the corporate network goes away. And we can do all kinds of scanning for security, independent of the device that’s being used.

This year we also saw the Stuxnet attacks, which we now know for certain were carried out against the Iranian nuclear program. Clearly this is a new kind of attack that can be mounted against industrial control systems via computer networks. Is Cisco researching this?

Massively. Often these types of attacks are targeted against Cisco’s biggest enterprise customers. Who buys Cisco’s infrastructure? The biggest banks in the world, the defense contractors. If the goal of an attacker is to disrupt an economy, their targets will be our customers, and they’re demanding a response from us. I like to call it global threat correlation, but it comes down to taking huge samples of network traffic and picking out good traffic from the bad. Cisco has a good advantage here because our equipment is so widely deployed around the world. As we start measuring traffic we can develop reputation data on every publicly routable IP address on the Internet. As we start putting telemetry info into that equipment–and the customer can choose to enable it or not, and it’s turned off by default. But people turn it on because it helps them against the unknown kind of attacks that are popping up. If a Web server says its a Web server, but you just saw it sending spam three minutes ago, there’s a pretty good chance it’s part of a botnet. Once you know that you know that, you can start to mount a pretty good defense. We’re putting a lot of energy into developing that, and it’s proven to be pretty robust.

The way to solve that problem, and this is especially true of companies, governments and nonprofits whose domains are often used for the purposes of spamming, is to vouch for the messages you do send, making it easier for spam filters to correctly catch the ones that really are spam.

One widely used method of doing this is by using DomainKeys Identified Mail. DKIM is an industry consortium that over the years has absorbed similar email security work done by Yahoo and Cisco Systems. One key problem is that it’s tricky to put DKIM in place.

Google announced today that its Google Apps customers will get a new feature that easily enables DKIM-certified mail. Google has long supported the DKIM standard, and in 2008 worked with eBay and PayPal to authenticate inbound messages from those domains. Now Google Apps customers can get the same certification. DKIM-signing for outbound messages will be enabled for Google Apps customers who turn on the feature in the “Advanced Tools” tab of their dashboard. Take that, spammers.

It’s been a long time since Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer ruled Hollywood and decided on the fates of the legion of stars under their strict command.

Today, of course, it’s a mess out there for talent, as the media landscape continues to fracture into ever tinier bits.

Thus, the curtain rises on AppRats, a start-up out of i/o Ventures that is taking an aggressive approach to helping YouTube’s top 100 celebrities build their fan bases on Facebook.

How aggressive?

AppRats isn’t asking for permission, even from clients.

I met with AppRats’ only two employees, CEO Charlene Kuperstein and CTO Ryan Moriarty, near their new Santa Monica, Calif. headquarters to talk about the market opening they think needs filling.

And, when asked what they were doing exactly, Moriarty–who recently became Dr. Moriarty after finishing a PhD in computer science and cryptography from UCLA–was quick to answer: “We’re hacking Facebook.”

After a recent round of seed funding, led by George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, and joined by the likes of Twitter’s head of Geo-Othman Larakai, AppRats now has another $230,000 with which to be disruptive.

Currently, a YouTube celebrity often interacts with fans using the Google-owned video site’s comments box directly below the video player.

A channel page–such as this one from MysteryGuitarMan–will list all the videos published by the producer’s account, and allow a some customization by the owner.

Fans leave comments, post response videos and follow along with the two to three videos most of YouTube’s top 100 channels post in a week.

AppRats has created FaceBook apps for each of the YouTube 100. They act like YouTube channel pages, but drop them inside Facebook and shake in some soft-core game dynamics.

“We make a branded spot to hang out with your favorite YouTube celebrity. It allows users to rate themselves as fans,” said Moriarty. “They can see how many videos they’ve watched, which ones they’ve missed, and get alerts about when the next video is published.”

Kuperstein said there was a three-week period around Thanksgiving when AppRats was adding 100,000 users a week, or three times its typical traffic, which is usually generated by YouTube celebrities linking to the AppRats Facebook app from elsewhere on the web.

The reason: AppRats started adding posts to a Facebook users’ wall every time they viewed a video.

But would that be essentually spamming all of a user’s friends?

“Exactly. And then Facebook shut that down,” admitted Kuperstein. “Now, we are emailing people whenever a new video from a subscribed channel comes out.”

For all its bravado, a great many questions remain for AppRats’ services, which its founders only seem to regard as a workaround.

That includes a major move into social from YouTube or, more likely, a major video push from Facebook might, overnight, fill in the crack that currently incubates AppRats.

Whether AppRats can hack its way out of these kinds of jams, of course, remains to be seen.