When the SEC charges someone with insider trading or any other crime, most lawyers will advise them that the best course of action is usually to keep their mouth shut and fight it in court. But some people just can’t help themselves. Martha Stewart, for instance, tried to fight her insider trading case in the court of public opinion, and it didn’t do her much good. Now another high-profile billionaire, Mark Cuban, is in the SEC’s sights. He knows that from a legal standpoint he should save his arguments for the judge, but he just can’t help himself. Cuban is fighting this case on his blog.

Or rather, he is letting his lawyers fight the case publicly on his behalf by printing their memos on his blog.

Barcelona-based 3scale Networks has just announced on its blog that it made the switch from private to public beta for its API infrastructure management system, which enables Web API providers to set up and manage developer and client relationships for their Web Services, monitor usage and enable payments.

3scale features an online marketplace where resources are provided for developers who use Web Services to discover relevant services and set up usage agreements with providers. 3scale’s Quality of Service monitoring keeps track of actual uptime and quality of the contracted Web Service.

3scale launched earlier today with an initial collection of 14 services ranging from search engines and mapping to translation services including Corank, Crawlerinfo, DataNibble, Happenr (full disclosure: I’m a Partner with Oxynade, the company behind Happenr), Ipoki, ISBNdb.com, MaxMind, Swoogle, TaWithYou and Weatherbug.

Here’s one thing that people all over the world will continue to need even in the worst of recessions: food. And while there are many places you can go to if you want to discover great recipes for home cooking, Cookstr is launching a website later tonight at a press event in New York City that takes a different route than all the cluttered and user-generated content sites out there: it’s all about the top chefs and cookbook authors, baby.

Cookstr has managed to sign up over 200 star chefs, cookbook authors and publishers who contribute to a database of high-quaility recipes for a wide variety of dishes, with more being added every day (both chefs and recipes). The contributor list is impressive, to say the least, including people like Mark Bittman, Jamie Oliver, Mario Batali, Nigella Lawson, Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Julia Childs, Alice Waters … the list just goes on and on.

Why do certain videos on YouTube become mass phenomena while the vast majority of videos just get a handful of views, if any?

Riley Crane, an American post doctoral fellow currently researching at the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at ETH university in Zurich/Switzerland, says he has the answer: According to him, the success of online videos can be explained with physics.

Crane claims every time a YouTube video turns into a hit, the development takes the form of an “attention spiral”, a geometric pattern that partly follows physical laws. He discovered that a decrease of popularity with certain videos, for example, can be explained through methods usually utilized in modeling the aftershocks of earthquakes. He believes social systems on the web follow the rules of physics and can therefore be analyzed mathematically.

It seemed almost like the Good Old Days when everyone waited on Microsoft to show their cards before doing anything. While Adobe took over Moscone West in San Francisco for its MAX developer conference, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Online Services operation at the St. Regis 3 blocks away before an audience of press, analysts, bloggers, and most importantly, business partners. As one Adobe high up said, “Microsoft is focused on the enterprise.”

Remember Metacafe? That’s right, the video entertainment site which got overshadowed by YouTube’s phenomenal rise? Well, it’s now making a huge gamble on a new product direction and doing so with zero guarantees. The gamble is WikiCafe, a collaborative editing approach for video metadata. To appreciate how important WikiCafe is to Metacafe just take a look at the company’s official R&D resource usage: 60% WikiCafe, 30% revenue generating opportunities, 10% everything else. That says it all.

I spent a few hours with Eyal Hertzog, the company’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer who walked me through the company’s new product vision and the rationale for its big bet on the wiki approach to organizing videos. Hertzog was frustrated that users (he being among them) couldn’t just locate “THE” result when searching for a video. His definition of “THE” being a single video result that encompasses all the relevant (and preferably accurate) info, along with multiple language versions, captioning, and so on. The current reality, of course, is that when we perform a search for a video we get back multiple results—sometimes even in the hundreds—from multiple sources, in various languages, with different view counts, fake versions . . .. You all know the drill.

The web is filled with countless editorial and user reviews on nearly every consumer product you can find in retail stores. But sifting through this wealth of information is a chore, and it’s never clear which reviewers actually know what they’re talking about. Bestcovery, a new startup launching today, is looking to eliminate these hassles by offering an at-a-glance guide to finding the best item in many popular consumer product categories. The site was founded by Kamran Pourzanjani, co-founder and former CEO of PriceGrabber.com, which was sold to Experian for $500 million.

Jerry Yang just put up a blog post on his reasons for stepping down as CEO of Yahoo.

In it, he highlights the successes of the past 18 months. Yahoo is now “rewired,” the new ad platform has been launched “that we think will transform how ads are bought and sold online,” and Yahoo remains “first or second in more than 20 product categories.” And he ends with the promise “that I will always bleed purple.” No matter what his critics might say.

The post is reproduced below in its entirety:

Is typing a colon and a parentheses too much for you? Need a dedicated emoticon keyboard? Well does Bajca have a product for you. This odd thing is a concept project consisting of a bunch of little balls with faces on them. When you’re feeling happy or bored, then press the button. Then you can wear them like jewelry. Confused? I know I am.

Those free iPhone apps will soon be filled with ads. VideoEgg is the latest ad network to extend its ads to the iPhone. The company is known for its video and social-app ads that entice people to click on them to open up a Flash window filled with videos, maps, or apps that let consumers learn more about a brand. VideoEgg only charges if a consumer engages with the ad.

It is taking the same approach with the iPhone, offering ads that can appear as a small banner at the top of the screen for any given app. When you click on the ad, a video could play or something that looks like a mini Webpage could pop up with more information about the brand. Why switch to mobile now?

Adding to the options of streaming movies to your PC, Mac, or TiVo, Netflix now streams 12,000 movies to the Xbox360. That includes 300 HD movies.

Xbox watchers have been waiting for this since last July. Add the Netflix streams with the Xbox 360’s Live Party feature and you can watch a movie with your friends remotely.

Boxee, maker of a social media center software platform for HDTVs and laptops, has secured $4 million in first round funding from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The two firms each accounted for exactly 50% of the investment.

Boxee is bringing us a step closer to a real social TV experience. The app gives your computer (Mac, Windows or Linux) or AppleTV a TV-like interface where you can stream local files like personal videos, music, and photos as well as third-party, mainstream web content from sites like YouTube, Hulu, Comedy Central, CNN.com, ABC.com, Last.fm, Flickr, etc. Basically anything that isn’t DRM-protected (which also means there’s no chance you’ll be able to play your entire iTunes library with boxee).

Boxee also enables you to retrieve music and movie reviews, song lyrics, trailers, album artwork etc. from the internet. The software comes with a social layer too: you can share information about what you’re watching with friends and make recommendations. You can also add services like Twitter, FriendFeed and Tumblr and post to them from the (beautiful) boxee interface, which turns it into a very powerful communication hub to boot.

Jerry Yang is the $1.8 billion man. The stock market thinks Yahoo is worth that much more without Yang at the helm.

That’s approximately how much the market capitalization of Yahoo’s stock went up this morning, with the first trade after last night’s announcement that Yang would be stepping down as CEO. The shares were up nearly 12 percent in early morning trading.

Glam Media has launched its application platform, called Glam Apps Atako, to the public. The platform was originally unveiled in July, and has remained in private beta until now.

Each application allows bloggers and site owners to quickly implement new functionality into their sites, with available options for syndicating content, adding rich media, and enhancing posts with comments and polls. At launch available apps include Sphere, BuzzFeed, Meebo, PollDaddy, PicApp, JS-Kit, and Kwanzoo, along with a video delivery widget developed in-house called GlamTV. Glam has also built the platform with monetization in mind, offering an integrated monetization system with built-in support for rev-shares. Built with Google Gadgets, the Glam Platform also supports OpenSocial and OpenID, with full open source availability beginning in Q4 2008.

It has come to pass that HDCP - High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (or, in this case, DisplayPort Content Protection) - is now built into the new MacBooks to protect iTunes Store media. Most of the content is not protected but it seems some newer videos are, which means you can’t play them over a non-HDCP compliant TV or monitor.

While many of us just use the screen or iPods to watch the potentially protected films, this could have ramifications for those wanting to connect their laptops up to TVs without HDMI or DVI ports - namely TVs with only VGA or component/composite ports. It could also have ramifications on the Apple TV in situations where users have odd TV set-ups.

Well, it happened. Google’s voice recognition mobile app finally arrived today on the iPhone App Store. Until today all we had to go by was the demo video that Google created showing it in action.

And that video shows something that quite simply changes the way I’d use the phone. Instead of clicking buttons on the virtual keyboard to search the web or my contacts, I’d just hit a button and use the Google Mobile App. And it really is just one button - it knows, via the accelerometer, when you put the phone to your ear and when you take it away. Voila! Cool stuff happens.

…but not exactly. I compared my real usage to the video usage. Results are below.

In early 2007 David Scott created a game called Flash Element TD that was an overnight sensation, reaching 2 million plays in only two days. A few months later, Paul Preece (a friend of Scott’s) decided to see if he could replicate the success of Flash Element, and went on to create Desktop Tower Defense - a game so popular and addictive that we said it should be banned. That June the two paired up to create a gaming company called The Casual Collective, and has been toiling for over a year to produce a crop of games that is now ready to make its public debut.

Tonight The Casual Collective is launching with eight games (four of which are brand new), all crafted by Preece and Scott, and many of which seem to be every bit as addictive as their now-classic games. Available games include Minions, which is reminiscent of a streamlined Command and Conquer, a platform game called Buggle Stars, and updates to Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense. Some of the games are notable for their multiplayer support, allowing up to twelve players to simultaneous play (while asynchronous Flash games like Chess are common, large fast paced games are much rarer).

Twitter is down. Super down. The status blog is silent on the issue, although the error message untruthfully says the site is down for database maintenance. If it was maintenance, it would be noted on the status blog. This is maintenance in the same way open heart surgery after a heart attack is maintenance.

We’ll know soon enough what happened. But for now it’s just nice to remember the good ‘ol days when we celebrated entire days going by without Twitter going down. The site has been far too stable lately, and I was beginning to get suspicious.

Amazon made good on their promise to launch a content delivery network by the end of the year this morning with the release of CloudFront.

Pricing in the U.S. and Europe starts at $.17/GB transferred, ranging down to $.09/GB for transfers over 150 TB/month. They’re somewhat higher in Asia. This isn’t the lowest CDN pricing out there by far, but it’s pay for usage only, giving smaller players a price advantage over large competitors like Akamai. And the service promises to work seamlessly with Amazon S3 and their other web services.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has more.

Earlier today Facebook released details on its new Verified App Program for third party developers.

Basically, application developers (there are 48,000 applications on Facebook today) can apply to become a Verified App. If they pass they get a badge and special placement in the Application directory, plus increased communication limits with users, increased visibility in the news feed and some free advertising credits. If they don’t pass, they get stuck into the unwashed masses of apps that aren’t verified because they aren’t “meaningful,” “trustworthy,” or “well designed.” The complete guidelines are here.

Basically, you don’t want to be in the loser group. Facebook users aren’t going to be quick to add an application that can’t meet basic competence or honesty standards. A developer trying to get users on an unverified app is sort of like someone trying to get a job as a doctor without a medical degree. It’s going to be hard.

So how do you get into the Verified App category? You pay. $375. Well, you have to pass those tests, but then you pay. You can be so Meaningful people make religious pilgrimages to your office. So Trustworthy that your Wikipedia edits are never questioned. And so Well Designed that the Apple guys call you up for tips. But unless you pay that $375, you ain’t getting the badge.