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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There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don’t have bylines. These are the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple (AAPL) iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube (GOOG), and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter.

The most recent hubbub over the gatekeeping function started when Twitter began listing Suggested Users a couple months ago for newbies who weren’t following anyone and didn’t get how the service worked. By highlighting popular Twitter feeds from news organizations such as the New York Times and celebrities such as Britney Spears, Twitter hoped to hook new users. The problem? There was no explanation of how anyone made it onto such a list, and all the featured users started racking up huge numbers of followers.

Video host and blogger Veronica Belmont said her growth rate of followers shot up to a few thousand new ones per day–now hitting around 275,000.

“At the time that I was featured, I already had a pretty successful following on the site, at around 50,000 readers,” Belmont told me. “Maybe Twitter thought that if those people enjoyed my Tweets, then new people would as well. I tend to write about things in the technology world, but I intersperse it with funny or cool links I find throughout the day.”

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It was not the most eloquent subject line for a farewell email to 5,000 co-workers: “So long, suckers! I’m out!”

But Jason Shugars worked at Google (GOOG), whose off-center corporate culture is more forgiving than that of your average buttoned-down investment bank. In the rest of his goodbye, Shugars, a senior sales compliance specialist, reminisced about workplace moments that included putting cake down his pants at a sales conference, stealing a boss’s $8,000 leather couch and singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time” in a miniskirt and braids.

“It took me a long time to write it,” said Shugars, 34, who left Google to become director of ad operations for the music streaming Web site, Imeem. “I didn’t want to send out a stale ‘good working with you, please reach me here’ e-mail. Who wants that?”

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Micropayments: Everybody’s talking about them! Will they save journalism? Can they help preserve the important tradition of reportage that results in an informed citizenship? Are they the solution to the problem of how to get readers to pay for valuable content?

No. People are idiots. I saw one of the freesheets yesterday whose cover conflated Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, who used anabolic steroids to give themselves an edge on the baseball field, with Michael Phelps, who smoked pot at a college party to make himself look cool. (And get high.) That’s the level of information people are getting from the free papers, and they seem to be perfectly happy about it. Why would they want to pay for anything more challenging or less imbecilic?

Still, we need a fully funded working press if even a small number of us are to remain informed enough about the world and its currents and conflicts. My proposal is a form of micropayment subsidy that enables the continued existence of information gathering and analysis so vital to our political literacy. A small fee will be added to the bill every individual or corporate entity is charged each month for Internet service. Those fees will be disbursed to news-gathering entities at the end of each month to pay for the kind of reporting which, despite the cost outlay required, rarely proves profitable.

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Days after a wave of phishing attacks fooled thousands of Twitter users, it appears that another security hole has been found by…someone. Obama’s account, unused since election day, sent out an affiliate link to a survey with a gas card prize, Fox News said that “Bill O’Reily is gay” (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and Britney Spears made a lewd post about her anatomy. Rick Sanchez, the Twitter-loving CNN anchor, says he’s “high on crack and might not be coming into work today.”

The Fox tweet was deleted an hour after it was posted, so the password may not have been changed. The Facebook account on Twitter just posted a link to porn, so it appears that the situation remains unresolved. Update: Twitter says it’s been resolved but that users should change their passwords! The Twitter blog has just posted an explanation of the breach.

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When we heard that pop singer Britney Spears was reinventing herself, we didn’t know it involved a Twitter account.

But it’s true–go to the newly revamped BritneySpears.com, and check it out. You can “Friend Britney” not only on Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and Britney’s own “VIP” social network, but also Twitter. For obvious reasons, it’s not actually Spears doing the Twittering. But you can still get updates like “OMG!! 7 hours until Womanizer premieres!!!!!!!” (”Womanizer” is Spears’ latest hit single) and “Hey paparazzi … Rolling Stone cover rumors? Too bad you weren’t inside the shoot. Brit had a great time and was dancing around the set.”

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For Austin rockers Spoon, 2007 was a breakthrough year–but not because they sold a lot of records. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, their album on the indie label Merge, garnered more radio play than any disc in their 15-year history and earned them an appearance on Saturday Night Live. So far the disc has moved just over 250,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan–about half of what Spoon’s manager, Ben Dickey, believes it would have sold even five years ago. “But as far as the band is concerned, the record is a hit,” says Dickey.

The reason? CD sales are no longer the yardstick the band uses. While hip-hop and pop artists ranging from Jay-Z to Britney Spears have long used recordings to sell everything from perfume to liquor, rockers are only just starting to think of album sales as a component–rather than the sum of–the commercial equation.

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If corn-based biofuels are the Britney Spears of the cleantech world (a fallen star but still all over the place), fuel made from algae is the next great “American Idol” winner (major potential in the pipeline). And despite the fact that algae-to-biofuel start-ups have been taking their sweet time bringing a pond-scum fuel product to market, some inroads have been made recently–GreenFuel is building its first plant, PetroSun starts producing at their farm on April 1, and big-oil Chevron and Shell have made some early bets as well.

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