Ashton Kutcher used conventional advertising, billboards to be precise, to gain victory over CNN in his twitter sprint to a million followers. Lamar Advertising, in a PR coup for the traditional ad network, delivered free of charge “Follow Ashton Kutcher” outdoor ads across its 1,133 digital billboards.
With Kutcher appearing on Oprah within hours of passing the million mark, this seems like a carefully co-ordinated integrated PR campaign. Even twitter has been fingerered with the accusation that they made it hard for users to unfollow @aplusk (Kutcher’s twitter handle).
Actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) became the first twitter user to achieve a million (1,000,000) followers at 6.12 UTC today. He narrowly beat CNN breaking news (@cnnbrk) which had overtaken the Barack Obama twitter account as the world’s most popular in the last few months. CNN became the second account with a million followers just under half an hour later . Both users had been heavily promoting their race to a million, Kutcher using UStream.tv and CNN using their own broadcast channel. The Huffington Post carried a live counter and follower graph that looked like something from a US presidential election.
Five blogs for you to follow this Friday. In the usual fashion it is a broad spectrum from student bedsit to fame and fortune. Top copy that I’d like to share with you as we wend our way towards the weekend. 
An article appeared in Popular Mechanics in April last year that began with the words “Search is dead”. The argument was that the huge escalation in social networks would eventually make algorithm based search engines redundant. This is a pretty bold claim when Google has become arguably the world’s most powerful brand. The core of the argument is that as social networking grows web users will find what they want by using their social network rather than search because of trust. Indeed people in general will know the answer that you want better than a mathematical equation. This has begun to happen with Twitter. Within days of starting to use the service I saw a request from Jemima Kiss, technology writer for The Guardian for information about about iTunes and a request from social media guru Shel Israel for information on business applications on Twitter. Shel got what he wanted in just 10 minutes, admittedly quite a bit slower than Google but qualified by trusted human intelligence:
Derek Draper has recently returned to the Labour fold to champion their social media offensive after many years of absence. He is a spin doctor of the old school who seems incapable of ditching the smoke and mirrors. He has been building a following on twitter but his account was suspended yesterday as a result of unusual activity, which usually means you have been breaking twitter rules in terms of the number of people that you are trying to follow. In effect spamming.
Scottish actor Ewan McGregor is the latest victim of 
In the last 24 hours Barack Obama’s Twitter has been 
I have been pretty resolutely old skool about Twitter, choosing to use the web as my application of choice. That was up until today when I decided to check out 
Recently I posted some 
