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Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have recorded a mass mailing of spam emails containing a link to a video advertisement on YouTube. Although in the past, spammers have attempted to lure people into clicking links by claiming the link would display a YouTube video, this is the first case in which the link actually does point to YouTube. In this particular incident, the video in question is a Russian ad promoting industrial real estate.

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Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

Over the weekend, Twitter's trending topics were once again the target of an attack, this time implemented by the members of the infamous image board 4chan, the site known for their internet memes and pranks. As with previous attempts to pollute the trends with nonsense, the hashtag pushed into the leaderboard was yet another inappropriate term. Last time this happened, we saw Twitter pull the offensive tags from the trends section, a move which prompted us to cheer: Twitter censoring trending topics? Isn't it about time?  Again, it seems the company has pulled the same move. By the time tech blogs picked up the story, the term had disappeared completely from the trends section.

Google released some interesting data about the volume and types of attacks its spam detection software identified over the last quarter. According to Google, overall spam levels in the second quarter of 2009 were 53% higher than during the first quarter, and 6% higher than a year ago. Even though the total volume of spam dropped by 70% after the the takedown of the infamous McColo ISP, it only took four months for spam levels to get back to normal. Last month, 3FN, an other large ISP spam source was also shut down, but spam volume only dropped by about 30%, and chances are that the spam market will simply rebound within a few months, as new spammers get into the market.

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The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.