Ashton, Oprah, Britney, when will it end?

Now Twitter is taking on a distinctly political bent, with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom using the service to announce his bid for governor of California. On Tuesday, he wrote: “It’s official- running for Gov of CA. Wanted you to be the first to know. Need your help. Check out video: http://tr.im/iOCN and ReTweet.”

How do his tweets stack up to the musings of the would-be Republican candidate, former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman?

For starters, Mayor Newsom has more than 290,000 followers, while Ms. Whitman has about 940 (point for Gavin).

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As Ashton Kutcher becomes the first to collect 1 million followers on Twitter and Oprah Winfrey sends out her first tweet, tech observers are debating: Does Friday mark a new peak for the microblogging service? Or the beginning of its demise?

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You can’t get more meta than a site that micro-blogs trends in micro-blogging. But we’re through the looking glass anyway, so here goes: Tinker.com, part of the distinguished Glam Media Network, is live streaming the Twitter race to a million followers between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@cnnbrk).

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While the very phrase “product placement” elicits jeers and hisses in the TV and movie worlds, on the Web something surprising has been happening: Branded content is emerging as not just a promising way to make money, but as creatively viable as well. Take Ashton Kutcher’s “Blah Girls,” which features sassy teen celebrity-bloggers who pause occasionally to quaff VitaminWater as they chase celebrity dirt.

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Paparazzi, eat your hearts out: Celebrities are now taking their own candid photos of themselves and putting them on the Web.

While watching the Academy Awards on TV Sunday night, Hollywood couple Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore sent text updates to fans via Twitter. At a post-Oscars party afterward, they also uploaded several grainy photographs using TwitPic, an application that allows users to post pictures taken with their mobile phones to their Twitter accounts. Mr. Kutcher posted two low-resolution photos: a blurred image of producer Sean Combs along with the note “Diddy throws up oscars” and one of Mr. Kutcher himself clutching an Oscar, accompanied by the text “Me and penelopes oscar.” Mr. Kutcher also uploaded a short live video from his mobile phone using Qik. Ms. Moore (or Mrs. Kutcher, as she refers to herself on Twitter) turned her cameraphone on herself and Mr. Kutcher decked out in their postceremony party gear, garnering thousands of hits in less than a minute.

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Ashton Kutcher’s practiced finesse and stage presence were completely out of place at the TechCrunch50 conference earlier this week, but his appearance was the talk of the show. Kutcher wasn’t in San Francisco to run a casting call for “Beauty and the Geek,” but to launch a Web video show focused on something about which he knows a fair amount: celebrity gossip. Celebrity spokespeople are a fact of life at this point, but celebrity tech founders? Like so many things, it’s a phenomenon that gets frothy every time there’s a bubble.

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