Not quite.

While such accounts are a pain — and Twitter spends significant resources trying to hunt them down — a new study says that the most egregious promoters of Twitter spam could actually be the likes of Lady Gaga or President Obama … and even you.

The study, from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, examined more than 40,000 identified spam accounts, and looked into how they tried to achieve success.

“Pretty much everyone on Twitter is targeted by spammers,” says Krishna Gummadi, head of the networked systems research group at MPI-SWS. “But the key question for us was ‘why would someone follow a spammer?’. So rather than focus on spammers themselves, we looked at their support network — the people who helped them.”

And what they discovered was that instead of being supported by other spam accounts — as is common with web-based spam — the egg people were reliant on real Twitter users for their success.

How it works

At the heart of Twitter’s spam problem are two things: the way the social messaging service works, and the way search engines think about the site.

First, Twitter prominently displays follower counts as a crucial measurement of popularity — something Google and others use that number to help determine somebody’s authority. Then, there’s a secondary effect: if you are followed by somebody who is followed by lots of people (what the researchers term somebody’s “indegree”) then your influence increases even more.

This leads to a kind of Twitter-based link farming, where spammers don’t simply target small-time users with just a few friends, but larger accounts with thousands — or sometimes millions — of followers. And unlike the web, where people with high reputation tend not to link to nefarious, spammy sites, many Twitter users automatically follow back anyone who comes their way.

“At the high end, politicians like Barack Obama’s campaign staff, or the UK Prime Minister’s office, these guys tend to follow back because they want to increase social engagement. But they’re following spammers back,” says Gummadi.

That top tier of users is topped by Yoko Ono, who boasts more than 775,000 people on her following list, but includes Gaga (currently following 139,000 people), Britney Spears (416,331).

But perhaps more dangerously, the study found that it was those in the middle of the scale who were causing the most damage by handing spammers credibility.

“The people with very low indegrees of just a few people were not responsible for spammers,” he says. “It was really people with 1,000 to 5,000 followers who were worst — that’s the range where there are a lot of people who follow back anybody. These are the social marketers.”

It’s a well-known grey hat tactic that following more people will increase your own follower count, and many people who try to profit will inflate their figures by following as many people as they can. But those individuals who are just trying to bump up their numbers are not just hurting their clients — they’re ruining search results for the rest of us.

“They want to increase their social capital and they have very similar incentives to spammers,” says Gummadi. “Spammers want to collect links, social marketers want influence. So they end up colluding with each other, even if not intentionally.”

You ain’t no follow back girl

Having identified the most dangerous Twitter users, Gummadi’s team — which included researchers from IIT Kharagpur, India, and UFOP in Brazil — have started exploring ways to reduce the impact of indiscriminate follow-backs.

That’s complicated, because it involves trying to change people’s behavior. But the researchers suggest it may be possible to implement some sort of “collusion rank” to sift out those people who are giving spammers oxygen and demote them. Just like Google’s pagerank can change depending on a site’s behavior, so too could their Twitter ranking if they link to too many spam accounts.

The team recognizes, however, that this may be tricky — because the line between helping a spammer and trying to be a good social network user can be very, very fine. After all, imagine how much time it would take Barack Obama’s team to sift each potential follower for spamminess — and the outcry if there was some sort of incorrect line drawn.

Whatever the case, it is clear to the research team that fighting Twitter spam needs to be about more than just shutting down accounts.

“We’re only beginning to understand spam in Twitter, and we’re sketching a solution,” says Gummadi. “But it does not lie in just banning spammers, because it doesn’t stop the social marketers.”

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Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work. This is according to a sample of more than 3,000 PHP programmers surveyed by Zend.

The runners-up for most-popular bands were Pink Floyd and Linkin Park.

Other findings: The PHP faithful seem mightily conflicted over Lady Gaga, who showed up in three categories. She was voted the biggest “guilty pleasure” — meaning that programmers listen to her but do so only with headphones — and she was voted one of the least popular vocalists by respondents.

The most loathed artist nod went to teen sensation Justin Bieber, who was followed by both Lady Gaga and Britney Spears (who was also a runner-up in the guilty pleasures category) in the voting.

Zend chief marketing officer Elaine Lennox said the company — which surveys its users every year on weightier matters — got the idea for the music questions after playing Lady Gaga before its conference in October and immediately witnessing an explosion of negative tweets. “The audience went crazy. We played Lady Gaga and apparently the crowd took exception,” she said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user skuds

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This isn’t the first time Gaga and Bieber have competed head-to-head on YouTube. Gaga held the top spot for the most-watched video ever on YouTube for a long time, but got surpassed by Bieber in July. Bieber’s Baby video has now been viewed more than 380 million times, as compared to Bad Romance with 303 million views.

Either way, all of this is good news for VEVO. The major label-owned music video platform publishes both artist’s videos on YouTube, so those billion views are further helping VEVO to establish itself as one of the biggest online video sites.

VEVO President and CEO Rio Cardeff is speaking at NewTeeVee Live tomorrow — and it’s not too late to get a ticket.

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Famecount.com first caught that Lady Gaga’s VEVO channel on YouTube surpassed one billion views this Sunday, a victory the Lady Who Occasionally Wears Meat shared with her fans on Twitter:

Technically, though, Gaga probably passed the billion view mark earlier than Sunday, because there are two dedicated Gaga YouTube accounts. Currently, if you combine the “official” Lady Gaga account with the VEVO one, the total is 1.134 billion.

Justin Bieber, Gaga’s major competitor for views on YouTube, probably isn’t too bummed about being beaten on total views. The music video for the Ludacris collaboration Baby is still the most-viewed YouTube video of all time (now beating Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance by 70 million views), and the trailer for his biopic/concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (in theaters next February) is out today.

While my initial reaction to hearing about this project was to predict the 3-D apocalypse, that’s changed since the announcement that the original director, An Inconvenient Truth helmer Davis Guggenheim, dropped out and was replaced by Step Up 3-D and LXD director Jon M. Chu.

Never Say Never plays directly to Chu’s strengths: specifically, utilizing 3-D technology to create visual spectacle and filming awesome dance scenes. This does not guarantee that it’s going to be good, but the concert sections will at least LOOK good.

So I’m calling it a draw for right now, but it’s time for Lady Gaga’s team to step it up. Because THAT’s the 3-D concert film I want to see.

YouTube’s Hunter Walk and VEVO’s Rio Caraeff will both be speaking at this year’s NewTeeVee Live! You shouldn’t miss it! Register now.

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The video for Bieber’s musical collaboration with rapper Ludacris, Baby, has just passed Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance as the most-watched video of all time on YouTube (the current listings still show Bieber in second place, but that should update soon according to a YouTube spokesperson). Its views are now at 246.3 million, beating out Bad Romance by about 600,000.

Both videos were uploaded within the last year (Bad Romance in November 2009, Baby in February 2010) and are distributed by Vevo, which is pretty impressive considering it’s taken the third-place video of all time, Charlie Bit My Finger, over three years online to earn 210 million views.

This news is pretty thrilling for Bieber fans (who are apparently seriously called Beliebers), as well as Bieber himself, who humbly Twittered that “what is goin on with the BABY video on youtube is crazy…i started on youtube so the support…well i just need to say thank u.”

He also said some nice things about Lady Gaga’s artistry, which was really generous and sweet of him. But that doesn’t mean, Lady Gaga fans, that you should feel bad about clicking the below a few times and helping your girl catch up.

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Darker and grimmer than past Gaga videos, with a less diverse array of wacky outfits than usual but a heavier emphasis on dancing as a trade-off, Alejandro doesn’t show the same interest in storytelling that the video for Telephone.

However, it also appears to be relatively free of the product placement that clearly subsidized Telephone‘s antics, perhaps because there’s also somewhat more explicitly sexual content. Also, you get to see what Gaga looks like without eyeliner — which is fascinating in and of itself.

Alejandro is being premiered the right way: Available in sizes up to 1080p through Vevo and YouTube, and fully embeddable for ultimate viral spreading. It may not end up changing lives and fashion like Bad Romance did, but it’s still contributing to the music video revolution that bumped Vevo up to the 6th spot on comScore’s April online video rankings. Because online audiences want their music videos — and event pieces like this are just a part of the reason why.

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Blockbuster Dips a Toe in the Mobile Stream; the company released an application that allows users to watch any of the 10,000 titles of its digital catalog on mobile devices. (NY Times Bits Blog)

Lady Gaga First to Hit 1B Video Views; Visible Measures reports that Lady Gaga’s music videos have cumulatively carried her beyond the 1 billion online-views threshold, becoming the first performer to do so. (CNET)

Blip.tv Doubles Video Views, Scores with New Ad Formats; the online video network for independent producers generated 85 million video views in February 2010, double the amount from a year ago. (VideoNuze)

Sky Player Extends Connected TV Options; Sky will launch its online TV service on a new range of connected TVs and set-top boxes after striking agreements with Cello and 3 View. (Broadband TV News)

Turner Sports Goes Interactive for NBA game; Turner Sports will offer a package of technologies during an NBA game on Thursday, including Twitter, multi-camera coverage online and a live chat in a move to attract fans watching on TV, the Internet and cellphones. (Reuters)

If Telephone didn’t say right at the beginning that it was directed by Jonas Akerlund, then the obvious suspect would have been Quentin Tarantino. After all, the video is an epic nine-minute homage to 1970s grindhouse and women-in-prison films with lots of strange visual devices. That puts it right in Tarantino’s wheelhouse — and they also use Tarantino’s wheels: the distinctive “Pussy Wagon” truck from Kill Bill, in which Tarantino can still be seen cruising around sometimes, was loaned to the production after Gaga told Tarantino her idea for the video over lunch.

Despite feeling like the product of another person, though, Telephone still demonstrates the wild creativity of the Gaga brand, with all the usual components of a Gaga video — lavish costumes, odd behavior and fierce dance numbers — reporting for duty.

The budget for Telephone is clearly huge — tons of extras, several locations, not to mention close to a dozen new outfits from the Haus of Gaga. Which is probably why this video features a perhaps over-the-top amount of product placement. I mean, the song is called Telephone, I’m not surprised that a cell phone partner (Virgin Mobile) was brought in. But Polaroid (which recently brought Lady Gaga on as a creative director) gets its plus, as do several other brands (just one I spotted — an awkward plug for dating site Plentyoffish.com).

Hats made from telephones don’t pay for themselves, but between this and OK Go’s reliance on State Farm Insurance sponsorship, it’s looking like a real trend is emerging in the music video world. Used to be music videos were out to sell albums — now, they seem to be selling everything but.

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iPhone-owning fans of Lady Gaga, rejoice: Today a new version of Tap Tap Revenge, Tapulous‘ iPhone rhythm game phenomenon, hits the App Store, loaded with 14 tracks from the breakout pop star. It’s also the first version of TTR that can be played with the iPhone held sideways during “boss tracks,” which require all four fingers.

The release of Lady Gaga Revenge is actually part of a much larger partnership with Universal Music Group, one of the big four record labels, that will see more Universal artist-branded versions of TTR come out later this year, and a track-purchasing system so TTR owners can buy songs for gameplay via Apple’s new in-app commerce feature. (When that service launches with Tap Tap Revenge version 3.0, cuts will cost you 50 cents each.) Tapulous’ partnership is similar to the one between the major labels and the video game studio Harmonix, which sells singles for play on their blockbuster, Rock Band (which have consequently sold 40 million tracks).

The Tapulous/Universal deal is a pretty big one for an app that launched only last July, first incorporating music from indie artists, then gradually coming out with versions with big-time acts like Nine Inch Nails and Weezer. In that time, TTR has remained among the top 25 apps and earned an install base of 11 million, Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem told me in a phone call yesterday. He credits that continued popularity to the frequent release of new TTR-playable content, and estimates the game has already sold an incredible 4-5 million songs.

Those sales numbers are particularly impressive because up until now, players had to exit out of Tap Tap Revenge to locate and download new content in the app store. Consequently, Decrem estimates only 4-5 percent of Tapulous owners have bought tracks. However, the addition of an in-game purchasing system will likely increase that conversion rate.

Along with new versions of Tap Tap Revenge featuring UMG music, look for Tapulous to expand the game’s online community experience. Tapulous’ Andrew Lacy told me TTR’s chat feature already processes a million messages a day, sent by hundreds of thousands of players who participate regularly. “We’re just scratching the surface of the community in Tap Tap,” as he put it. With that kind of engagement, I wouldn’t be surprised if Universal stars began showing up in TTR chatrooms to promote their Tap Tap music themselves.

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