In a post from co-founder Biz Stone, the company counsels users that, with the exception of a single account, none of their personal information seems to have been exposed as a result of the hack. But before establishing that, Stone goes out of his way to explain that Twitter’s security problems are Twitter’s security problems, not cloud computing’s security problems or Google’s (GOOG) security problems.

This attack had nothing to do with any vulnerability in Google Apps which we continue to use. This is more about Twitter being in enough of a spotlight that folks who work here can become targets. In fact, around the same time, Evan’s wife’s personal email was hacked and from there, the hacker was able to gain access to some of Evan’s personal accounts such as Amazon and PayPal but not email. This isn’t about any flaw in web apps, it speaks to the importance of following good personal security guidelines such as choosing strong passwords.

That last line seems directed at the likes of analysts like yours truly, who suggested this morning that the hack would raise concerns about the security of services that place work data on shared servers accessed via the Web. (Though the Twitter guys did seem to like my underwear-drawer metaphor. Cool!)

Stone then goes on to rattle a sword, gently but pointedly, at Web sites that have published stuff pilfered by the hacker.

We are in touch with our legal counsel about what this theft means for Twitter, the hacker, and anyone who accepts and subsequently shares or publishes these stolen documents. We’re not sure yet exactly what the implications are for folks who choose to get involved at this point but when we learn more and are able to share more, we will.

Note that while it’s easy enough to find this stuff on the Web, only a handful of mainstream Web sites, including TechCrunch, Gawker and Silicon Alley Insider, have published it, and most of what they have published is banal. I’ve asked all three sites for a response to Twitter’s response.

In the meantime, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, who has promised to publish more, announces in a new post that he is in the midst of “negotiations” with Twitter’s lawyers about his plans. Happy to hear from a First Amendment specialist, but I don’t think Twitter has a case against Web publishers here; the issue is an ethical one, not a legal one.

UPDATE: Here’s Gawker Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder’s “bring it on” retort:

It’s hilarious to see Twitter, which has become a conduit for real-time, unauthorized information from places like the New York Times’ internal meetings, now get prissy about corporate privacy. Ev Williams seems to have learned a lot about the mores of the institutional elite during his stay in Sun Valley. As for Twitter coming after us for publishing the docs, the only thing I’m upset about is that the leaker didn’t come to us with them first.

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]

Looks like Craigslist is trying to do the same thing. The online classified ad service is shutting down its “Erotic Services” section under pressure from state and local officials from around the country. In its place, Craigslist will open an “adult” category. It promises to keep said area cleaner by having employees sweep it periodically for ads that are obviously soliciting prostitution, etc. AP:

“We’re very encouraged that Craigslist is doing the right thing in eliminating its online red light district with prostitution and pornography in plain sight. We’ll be watching and investigating critically to make sure this measure is more than just a name change,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Good luck. As Gawker points out, this stuff is very likely to end up somewhere else on Craigslist because that’s the nature of the beast.

But still, not a bad idea. Internet + sex is always an attractive target for crusading lawmakers with an eye for a good headline (see MySpace, “sexting,” etc.). Craigslist is a higher-profile target than ever these days as it shares boogeyman status with Google (GOOG) for people looking to blame the death of newspapers on… something.

And the “move it somewhere else” strategy can work. Spread the bad stuff around–or at least into lower-profile places–and it seems less upsetting. As a reminder, here’s a semifictionalized version of what Times Square used to look like circa mid-1970s, via “Taxi Driver”:

Not the veterans of Denton’s Defamer, the showbiz site he rolled into his Gawker flagship in February. The three men–Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale–are essentially reconstituting their old site, using the name and Web address of an even older site, Movieline.com.

For more on the history of the original Movieline magazine, which started in 1989 and survived for a couple of years following the end of Bubble 1.0, see Abramovitch’s welcome post.

For more on the impetus to start up an entertainment blog in a market that’s struggling to  support the existing ones, we’ll have to talk to Jay Penske. Penske, the son of auto magnate Roger Penske, is relaunching Movieline as part of Mail.com, the white-label email provider that raised $35 million last year and has plans to get into the content business.

No, I don’t get it, either. So until we get a chance to sit down with Penske, let’s conclude with a quote from Abramovitch, who is as optimistic as one should be when launching a blog: “I  just think it’s a viable thing,” he says. “If you have smart writing about pop culture, people will come to you.”

Bear with me, because it’s a bit knotty: Last week, Friedman, a gossip columnist for News Corp.’s FoxNews.com, wrote up a glowing review of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the newest X-Men movie from News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox studio. The problem is that the movie won’t be released until May, and Friedman was reviewing an unfinished “work copy” that got leaked to the Web last week amid much hubbub.

And the real problem, according to Friedman’s employers, was that his review appeared to endorse online movie piracy. So he’s been fired.

Or has he? News Corp. (NWS) officials say he’s already gone. Here’s their official statement:

“Roger Friedman’s views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”

But Fox News’s statement is more circumspect and less specific: “This is an internal matter that we’re not prepared to discuss at this time.” I haven’t heard back from Friedman yet, but last night he was telling Variety that he hadn’t been canned.

We should know more soon: A person familiar with the matter told me that Fox News officials will be meeting to discuss Friedman’s fate this morning. The Huffington Post and Gawker have heard the same thing. No idea whether this is just a formality, necessitated by the fact that the scandal broke over the weekend, or whether Fox News chief Roger Ailes is really considering keeping Friedman on. I’ll update when I hear more.

UPDATE: It’s official. Friedman is out. Per Fox News: “Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately.  Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman’s ten years of contributions to building foxnews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors.  Mr. Friedman is grateful to his colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade.”

Until then, I encourage anyone who’s interested in this to head to RopesofSilicon.com and check out Friedman’s original post, which Fox News has now taken down (you’ll need to zoom in with your browser to make the thing legible). I see why Friedman’s employers (who are ultimately my employers too since this site is owned by News Corp.’s Dow Jones) are arguing that his column “promotes piracy.” It does wax on about how easy it is to watch pirated stuff on the Web these days.

But since he’s obviously not the first person to note that–I don’t think we can even call it an open secret at this point–I’m wondering if there isn’t something else at work here. Anyone have any bright ideas?

Meanwhile, here’s a preview of the film. Go ahead, and press play if you’d like–it’s officially sanctioned.

Google (GOOG) has some 20,000 employees, so the scale of the sackings isn’t earth-shaking news. And these aren’t Google’s first cuts: In January the company got rid of 100 recruiters. In February it announced it could cut up to 40 jobs as it folded up its radio group.

But the fact that these cuts come from sales and marketing, which just lost its high-profile leader, Tim Armstrong, to Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and replaced him with Google veteran Dennis Woodside, is interesting. As is SVP Omid Kordestani’s note explaining the cuts, in which he says Google simply made hiring mistakes as it grew its sales group.

Here’s the complete text of Kordestani’s post:

Google has grown very quickly in a very short period of time. When companies grow that quickly it’s almost impossible to get everything right–and we certainly didn’t. In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process. That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.

So today we have informed Googlers that we plan to reduce the number of roles within our sales and marketing organizations by just under 200 globally. Making changes of this kind is never easy–and we recognize that the recession makes the timing even more difficult for the Googlers concerned. We did look at a number of different options but ultimately concluded that we had to restructure our organizations in order to improve our effectiveness and efficiency as a business. We will give each person time to try and find another position at Google, as well as outplacement support, and provide severance packages for those who leave the company. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone affected for all they have contributed to Google.

You owe me. I had to get off my sickbed today to call David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, and ask him if he really was in talks to sell his company to Yahoo (YHOO), as you reported today on Gawker/Valleywag. For the record, David says your report is “categorically untrue.”

I’d spend more time discussing it, but, as I said, I’m feeling under the weather. And your story is not true. So here’s what Karp has to say via his Tumblr account.

And here’s what Marco Arment, who helped start Tumblr with Karp a couple of years ago, says:

And here’s what venture capitalist Bijan Sabet, whose Spark Capital helped raise a $4.5 million round for Tumblr last year, says via his Twitter account:

Now I’m going to return to my convalescing. Please give me a break for another day or so.

[Image Credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

Why is this noteworthy? Because the AP, which is actually a cooperative owned by 1,500+ member newspapers, supplies the bulk of the content that fills your daily newspaper or Web site, or whatever.

Since much of the copy the AP produces is lifted from its participating members–that’s the point of the co-op structure–the cuts don’t necessarily mean that its output is going to diminish in any way. But if it does, it poses a real problem for the same companies that are currently cutting their own staffs, since they depend on the AP to fill their holes.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Time magazine, for instance, just laid off many of its foreign bureau reporters. Right now, Time can reasonably expect wire services like the AP to pick up the slack (that image above is an AP mailbox from Belgrade). But if they don’t…

The Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. The NY Observer and Gawker have details; the NY Post’s Keith Kelly reports that Matt Turck and Charles Kammerer, publishers of This Old House and Golf Magazine, respectively, are also out.

That brings the total body count (announced firings + requested resignations) to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year. Which means the next few weeks will continue to be unpleasant.

UPDATE: Add another 8-10 from In Style.

One thing Time Inc. staffers won’t be seeing during that time: More memos announcing details of the reorg. Executives at the company seem to have concluded that internal communications that have been showing up at this Web site and others haven’t helped employee morale. That seems sensible. But it also means that employees have even less information about their fate than before.

Meanwhile, I’m still collecting tips. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

Yes, this is the third post I’ve written today about Gawker Media’s Nick Denton, who seems to prefer to get all of his news out at the same time.

But briefly:

• Denton has put Consumerist, his, um, pro-consumer site, up for sale.
• Denton is folding Valleywag, his Gawker-for-techies site, into…Gawker. Editor Owen Thomas will keep his job, and essentially become Gawker’s man in Silicon Valley. Writer Paul Boutin will contribute some stories, but likely fewer.
• Denton has more moves to come. Conveniently, he has provided a playbook for them via his post this morning, in which he spells out what Internet publishers should do in the face of a cratering ad market. Educated guess: If you sell ads for Denton, or work for one of his most successful titles (Gawker, gadget site Gizmodo, videogame site Kotaku), there are decent odds you will get to continue doing so in the future. Everybody else, all bets are off. Then again, that’s the same position that all those with a job in media finds themselves in these days. Cheers!

But the layoffs that Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke predicted would get announced today have not materialized.

Gawker did get its hand on a memo from Bob Bakish, who is president of Viacom’s MTV International unit, in which he tells everyone that the group has stopped hiring and has “instituted significant restrictions on discretionary items such as on travel, entertainment, consulting, third party services and the like.”

This comes a day after Viacom told all of its workers it would be nixing holiday parties but was giving everyone two extra vacation days off instead, which is a great idea.

Finke was correct in thinking that this would be an excellent day to shovel bad news out the door, though. Hard to imagine that anyone is paying attention to anything that doesn’t have the word “election” in it. But for the record, here’s Bakish’s memo:

From: Alexander, Linda-LA
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 2:29 PM
To: All at MTVNI O&O
Cc: [A bunch of people]

Subject: On behalf of Bob Bakish – IMPORTANT

Team:
We are living in a time of unprecedented economic challenges. It is clear that the global economic slow down is real and will take us into next year. With that in mind, we need to dramatically reduce our spending for the balance of the year and for 2009.

Senior managers across the regions and strategic services have been given this message and are in the process of identifying savings opportunities. As you know, we have suspended all hiring (including staff, temps and freelancers) and instituted significant restrictions on discretionary items such as on travel, entertainment, consulting, third party services and the like.

I know these actions are not pleasant and delivering this message is not easy. However, it is the right thing to do. We, like others around us in media and the general business community, have no choice but to respond quickly to this difficult environment. It is only with this type of response that we can ensure our Brands will continue to prosper and provide our global consumers the innovative content they want and our partners the unique value they expect.

In addition, as many of you read in Philippe Dauman and Tom Dooley’s e-mail, our company will be forgoing all divisional, regional and corporate holiday parties and instead giving all employees, including everyone internationally two additional vacation days to be used during your respective holiday season as coordinated with your respective supervisor. We feel in times like these, giving our employees the extra time to spend with family and loved ones is much appreciated.

Again, I know this is not easy but we are not alone and we will make it through. Thanks as always for focusing on driving us forward–even in this period where going forward means spending less.

Bob”

The New York Times (NYT) is in lousy shape, so it needs to sell off About.com, the kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator it bought from Primedia in 2005. So says Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo.com is a kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator.

Not true, say two people familiar with the Times and About; they say the paper isn’t shopping the property.

Calacanis, who made the remarks during the most recent This Week In Tech podcast, doesn’t go into much detail about his claim. Gawker has a link to the audio, but here’s the relevant transcript, in its entirety:

They’re going to have sell About. They’ve been trying to sell About.com, from what I understand.”

NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis offered up the standard we-don’t-comment-rumors-and-speculation line.

That said, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at some point in the future. The Times really does need money, and since About.com is both growing and profitable, it may be the most valuable asset the Times now owns.

But that’s exactly why the New York Times would be reluctant to part with it. Like it or not, About.com may well represent the Times’ future.

This isn’t the first time a Web reporter has suggested that About.com is on the block, by the way. I wrote the same thing earlier this year, and I was wrong then.