Laurie Percival at Lalawag astutely noticed that Ashton Kutcher has somehow managed to finagle nearly 800,000 Twitter followers -- second only to CNN Breaking News. Then Kutcher made a video saying he would "ding dong ditch" Ted Turner's house if he got 1 million followers before CNN.

Meanwhile, fameball* Julia Allison promised to dye her hair red if she could reach 25,000 Twitter followers before Kutcher hits 1 million. (She also promises to "video it. And send it to Ted Turner." By that I don't know if she means sending the hair or the video, not that Turner would care either way or that it would represent any radical gesture on her part. But I digress.)

Perez Hilton promised nekkid pictures of Zac Efron and Robert Pattinson (together?!) if he gets more followers than Ashton. And Larry King shot a video of his mock-tough schtick, taunting Kutcher for thinking he can top CNN.

That was yesterday. At this writing, Kutcher's Twitter numbers have jumped to 921,871, with CNN at 955,224. (For what it's worth, he already dwarfs the New York Times, Barack Obama and NPR.) And tomorrow, he will be on the Larry King Show "discussing his Web video post earlier this week challenging CNN to a popularity contest on the internet social media site Twitter. Kutcher and CNN are each trying to achieve 1 million followers before the other on the popular micro-blog."

Yeah.

Remember in the fifth grade, on Valentine's Day, when it became all important to collect more valentines than anyone else -- didn't matter who they were from, what they said or if they said anything at all?

Facebook has launched Payback Time, an application that lets users unleash on the movies they hated. The snarky rants receive user votes; the bile with the most votes win "refunds" in the form of ticket vouchers. Payback Time is a spinoff of Spill.com, a site that uses animated film critics and uses the tagline, "If it's crap, we'll tell you." [Underwire]

Today is the beta launch of ad platform MySpace MyAds, "a new, do-it-yourself advertising platform that democratizes the landscape of online advertising, enabling anyone to create customized banner ads, target to specific audiences using MySpace’s HyperTargeting technology, and analyze campaign performance tracked throughout the MySpace ecosystem." Well. It's pitched as ad sales for dummies: click a link at the bottom of any MySpace page, set ad unit rates anywhere from $25-$10,000, figure out what ROI means and you're on your way. Here's a press-release testimonial from a (presumably) pre-beta user, Blayne Weaver, an actor-independent filmmaker who recently completed the comedy "Weather Girl" starring Kaitlin Olson and Jon Cryer. “With MySpace MyAds, I can bring my message to an audience that I normally wouldn’t have access to nor even know where to find. It was great to be able to orchestrate my own advertising aimed at the exact audience I wanted to target – people who liked watching movies." [Business Wire]

The UTA Job List is now available in blog format. Congrats! However, they might want to seek a slogan that doesn't so effectively damn with faint praise. [Defamer]

>> UPDATED TO ADD: HAL eats egg, gets some on face

More record companies are avoiding iTunes, the largest U.S. music retailer, saying that the single-track sales model hurts sales overall, Ethan Smith and Nick Wingfield report. Among those who have just said no to Apple's music store are Kid Rock (his last album sold 1.7 million copies). That led his label, Atlantic Records, to pull another performer, Estelle, from iTunes -- even though one of her tracks had just entered the top 10 of that week's downloads. By comparison, rapper M.I.A. sold 888,000 downloads of the single "Paper Planes;" the album it comes from, "Kala," has moved 272,000 units. [Wall Street Journal]

>> RELATED: Radiohead, other UK artists form Featured Artists Coalition in bid to gain control [BBC]

UK internet entrepreneur Stephan Shakespeare has launched CoProducer, an online moviemaking site that allows anyone to join "an online panel of CoProducers (that) will have their say on all aspects of the movie, from pitch to post-production, in exchange for receiving a share of 55% of the movie's net profits. Genevieve Hassan joined the site in August and has been tracking its progress; she notes that with more than 90,000 registered members, the profit "reality will be more like a thank you credit than hard cash" and calls the discussion board "surprisingly intelligent." Shakespeare, who also co-founded the global polling agency YouGov, says, "I thought I'd do this as a separate project to see if creativity could be harnessed in a simple voting platform." The top 10 shortlisted ideas are now being voted on for script development; whatever it winds up being, Shakespeare says he already has funding for its production. [BBC]

Universal Music Group wants to launch a Hulu-ish standalone music video site, hopefully early next year. And why not? Universal has the most-watched YouTube channel, with 2.6 billion views over the past year, and internal projections put Univeral's video revenue at $100 million for 2008. However, unlike Hulu, this appears to be an in-house project; as Peter Kafka points out, "It'll be a lot harder to convince EMI, Sony or Warner to contribute their stuff to the site. And while Universal is the biggest player on the block, a video site that only has one label's videos isn't that compelling." [Silicon Alley Insider]

How The Mighty Have Fallen, Dept. of: The site, which launched in beta this summer, bills itself as "the women’s web destination for celebrity and entertainment news, casual games, fashion and community." The release goes on: "The five-minute webisode will feature Joan and Melissa’s refreshingly candid 'best dressed' comments, as well as their fiercely funny 'worst dressed' barbs and the Ooooh! Shoe Review. The Ooooh! Shoe Review portion of the show will highlight interactive links to online shoe retailer Zappos.com, which was among the first brands to be featured within MyHollywood content." [BusinessWire]

Under the beta feature that launched Sept. 15, more than 6,000 TV episodes are available for viewing in full, for free, with "limited commerical interruption." Says founder Col Needham, "Our goal is to show our users every movie and TV show on the Internet for free on IMDb.com." Creators can also download their content to IMDb. Among the shows included in the launch are "24," "Family Guy," "Heroes,"  "The Office" and "The Simpsons." Launch partners are CBS, Hulu, Sony Pictures Television and assorted indie filmmakers. [Press release]

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, who once appeared before a Senate Judiciary Committee to decry the availability of Metallica 's catalog on Napster, says he welcomes the internet leak of their new CD. "If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days," he said in an interview on San Francisco radio station Live 105. "It's 2008 and it's part of how it is these days." "Death Magnetic" is scheduled for release Sept. 12. [BBC News]

"If C-SPAN has a demographic, no one I know is part of it," Michael Arrington writes. However, that could change with its launch of two sites dedicated to user-generated convention coverage that will include contributions from YouTube, Twitter, streaming video phone Qik and Twitter as well as third-party blog content. Preview the sites here and here . [TechCrunch]

"Division," which launched Aug. 16, stars Rosario Dawson as a New York detective trying to find her fiance's murderer. The format is meant to have groundbreaking potential: Instead of ads, the five-minute episodes on Hulu.com incorporate "blatant product placements," writes Paul Boutin. So far, not so good; comments include "terrible," "obvious green screen" and "the worst elements of 'Cloverfield.'" [Valleywag]

Pandora gets 1 million listeners daily and attracts 40,000 new customers a day, but founder Tim Westergren tells Peter Whoriskey, "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for webcasting." He says royalty fees will amount to 70 percent of 2008 projected revenue of $25 million. Traditional radio doesn't pay performance royalties; satellite radio pays 6 or 7 percent of revenue. [Washington Post]

CNET blogger Chris Matyszczyk says he's heard several NBC online advertisers are looking to buy space elsewhere. NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker says the network's site has seen 30 million unique users; ComScore puts NBCOlympics.com at 6.7 million for the week ending August 10, with Yahoo's Olympic section getting 8 million uniques. Matyszczyk wonders whether viewers are rejecting Zucker's tape-delay strategies to "bottle" Olympic excitement. [Technically Incorrect]