Just as the firestorm of controversy about ad-supported bloggers begins to die down, Twitter is about to see a surge. Paid tweets are on the way – and they’ll have some celebrities behind them.

Holly Madison (from “The Girls Next Door”) will be one of at least 10 celebs to help roll out “SponsoredTweets.com”, a new service that will let advertisers reach out to popular Twitter users and hire them to promote products in 140 characters or less.

“The goal is to make this a platform that has a diverse base of celebrities participating - everything from TV stars to sports celebrities to sports teams and media properties,” says Ted Murphy, founder of the site.

Scheduled to go live on July 27, SponsoredTweets won’t be exclusive to stars. Any Twitter user can sign up and set their price to tweet a product. Advertisers will then contact users that interest them and make an offer.

“The average Twitter user has less than 150 followers,” says Murphy. “Celebrities have hundreds of thousands. Those turn into some pretty big assets for the celebrities and we want to provide them with a tool to monitize those.”

There’s a slippery slope by mixing ads with tweets, though. Fans often see celebrity Twitter accounts as a way to communicate directly with actors, musicians and sports stars. To see those personal missives mixed with ads could damage that relationship.

There’s also the shadow of the paid blogging controversy. Many bloggers who acted as journalists have acknowledged accepting cash to positively promote a product. In this case, how will fans be able to differentiate between a casual mention of a product in a tweet and a paid endorsement?

Murphy says the ads will be clearly labeled.

“Everything in the platform - every tweet - has to be disclosed,” he says. “What we’ve done is built in a software system that enforces disclosure. We’re trying to bring a level of transparency to the process.”

Perhaps so, but one of Twitter’s appeals for many people has been its reputation as an Oasis from the ad clutter of the rest of the Internet. Upsetting that balance could be a risky game.

The appointment of former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta to replace co-founder Chris DeWolfe atop MySpace has numerous Web pundits buzzing over the same question: What does the News Corp.-owned social networking site have to do to rebuild its buzz and its business?

On the former point, MySpace is clearly losing to Facebook and even, to a certain extent, Twitter. Though it's hardly that small, it is now to Facebook what Friendster was to MySpace a few years ago.

On the latter point, News Corp. is having a tough time justifying its $580 million purchase of the site, especially now that its approximately $300 million search deal with Google (the site's main monetization tool) is set to expire next month and unlikely to be renewed at anywhere near the same rate.

"The company then has a potential black hole in terms of profitability," Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Michael Nathanson told the New York Times.

News. Corp's new chief digital office, Jon Miller, was obviously brought on in large part to help figure that problem out. And his first move is apparently new management brought in from MySpace's biggest competitor.

So what should MySpace do? What strengths does it have to build on?

Caroline McCarthy at CNET News argues it should increasingly become an entertainment company. Two of its most compelling features currently are social gaming (which she says help explain why MySpace's pageview lead is so big even though its unique user lead over Facebook is rapidly shrinking) and its well received new music offering, which joins together social networking with streaming tracks.

"If people can be confident that MySpace is a reliable hub for finding insidery information about the latest in entertainment--fresh new bands, movie previews, the fall TV season, great Web video--that could be enough to get its momentum back," McCarthy writes. "It might've started out with the tagline "a place for friends," but maybe the attitude should change to "a place to be cooler than your friends."

Meanwhile, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo.com, founder of Weblogs Inc. (since sold to AOL), and my former boss at Digital Coast Reporter / Silicon Alley Reporter, has a suggested list of ten priorities for Van Natta. Some seem a little wacky, like buying a search engine to to keep some of the traffic its losing to Google (those of us with a Google bar in our browser will still search the way we want to) and buying or building a network of content sites (because content is such an easy way to make money online these days? As Jason admits, much of Weblogs' value lied in its technology, not its consumer-facing product). But others seem very savvy: