• by Gavin O'Malley , April 16, 2009

In a significant advance for meta media, Glam Media's recently launched micro-blogger platform Tinker.com is hosting celebrity Ashton Kutcher's race with CNN to secure one million followers on the popular micro-blogger service Twitter. 

Experts see the competition, and the media coverage of it, as yet another warning for professional newsgatherers who are being increasingly marginalized by modern technology.

"What he's doing, quite effectively, is incubating a new force in celebrity worship: the 'consumer paparazzi,'" said Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Nielsen Online digital strategic services, and an expert in the field of new media buzz.

"Celebrities are no longer working through the lens of the media," Blackshaw added. "They are directly engaging with their fans."

As of Thursday afternoon, CNN Breaking News had nearly 972,000 followers on Twitter, while Kutcher had just over 963,000 followers.

With Tinker, Glam Media has placed the focus of micro-blogging on events, rather than individuals, by collecting and sorting real-time conversations and comments from Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed users.

Tinker users can follow events sorted by various themes -- celebrity, news, food, music, movies -- or choose to create their own categories. Perhaps more intriguing, Tinker is also monetizing the micro-blogging experience by placing display advertising alongside particular event comment streams.

Glam is not the first media company to experiment with micro-blogging services like Twitter, which have yet to establish solid revenue streams.

Rival ad network Federated Media recently began working with Twitter to combine conversations and comments, and then getting brands to sponsor the threads. ExecTweets, for example, is a collection of tweets from executives, and is sponsored by Microsoft. MarchTweetness was dedicated to the March Madness basketball tournament, and was sponsored by AT&T.

Glam, meanwhile, says it is making the opportunity for advertisers safer by offering filters and controls to prevent brands from appearing alongside inappropriate content.

Glam claims to have launched the service today with over 100,000 posts by more than 25,000 people on 200 categorized events.