Spam message volumes have doubled over the past 12 months; situation is worsened by the recent emergence of image spam. The BorderWare Security Network has reported that image spam currently accounts for at least 35% of the overall spam volumes and this trend is on the rise. BorderWare data indicates that there are more than 25 image spam campaigns under way at any given time.

Image spam is a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like it is 100% text-based, when in fact it is an image that looks exactly like a regular email message. In addition, while all image spam messages may look the same to an end-user, spammers have programs to automatically create each image to have slightly different coloration, speckle patterns, or fonts. This causes messages to appear unique when received and processed by spam filters. The randomness of the images and the message contents make image based spam difficult to classify. Current filters used to prevent image spam including OCR and fingerprinting are not effective to protect against today’s image spam threats. Source

To help defeat these attacks, BorderWare's Intercept™ Image Analysis is one technology you can use to stop image spam. Intercept Image Analysis is an image classification technique, to be used in addition to the existing and effective threat detection techniques to specifically combat image spam. Learn More

Gickr.com lets you create animated GIFs quickly and easily using images from your Flickr account. You can also individually upload images to Gickr that you want turned into an animated GIF.

No software to install, and free.

Microsoft Windows Live Search lost market share from 12% of total online searches in November to 8.2%, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Source

A controversial study shows Google's true search market share to be 70%. Source

The SEOmoz Blog points out two heat map tracking software solutions.

CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?

ClickDensity is the other one I found and seemed to offer wider and more detailed statistics. Setup seems to be a breeze. Costs seem lower per 1 000's.. They offer some nice A/B test splitting, allowing you to change snippets of html code as you like to compare conversions.

And of course, Google Analytics offers some primitive heat map capability in the form of their 'site overlay' report (see screenshot below).

Does Google use the Meta Description tag? Check out these comments. Some same Meta Description tags are ignored by Google. This Google Groups post by Google's Vanessa Fox has this comment saying you should use the meta description tag:

Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn't found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page -- in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page. Source

And this comment cements the need for unique Meta Description tags when optimizing for Google:

...by adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page...Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. Source

Need to evaluate best-of-breed email marketing tools? For low to mid-range deployments, here are three good contenders to evaluate:

• http://www.intellicontact.com
• http://www.verticalresponse.com
• http://www.constantcontact.com

If you don't have a Google Sitemap now, with this breaking news, you'll especially want to set one up:

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to all support a unified system of submitting web pages through feeds to their crawlers. Called Sitemaps, taking its name from the precursor system that Google launched last year, all three search engines will now support the method.

More about Sitemaps is to be provided through the new Sitemaps.org site. As part of the announcement, the existing sitemaps protocol from Google gets a version upgrade to Sitemaps 0.9. However, no actual changes to the system have taken place. The new version number was simply done to reflect the protocol moving from an exclusive Google system to one that all three search engines now support. source

So what does a Sitemap look like? Check mine out at http://stanshinn.com/sitemap.xml.

You can generate them by hand, but even better is to install some software to generate it automatically.

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more

Is your page too 'heavy' and need help loading faster? Need to measure how your website performs? Try out NetMechanic to diagnose this and other ailments that can drag down the usability of your web site.

Want to increase comments on your web site article? Try making the feedback option more prominent. Take a look at how ZDNet formats their comments button (on the left below):

Also note they add this to the top of the article page. See it in action at ZDNet.