Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel went over the million mark soon after, but still a clear second.

Here is a pix, below, from Twitter HQ of the Kutcher win, on its database (courtesy of Twitter’s Jessica Verrilli).

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

That would be Kutcher vs. CNN.

CNN was all over the issue on airwaves tonight touting its Twitter feed, because–you know–there is no more important news to cover, like the weak economy or anything.

And at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, staff was up monitoring the race to one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Kutcher is scheduled to be on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” later today, along with Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams, when the talk show host will do her first tweet.

Oprah, of course, will get to one million users in 4.67 seconds, which is making everyone on Twitter worry about the looming Fail Whale of all time.

(Oprah Friend-in-Chief Gayle King is already up and tweeting via @kinggayle–with her first one going over 140 characters, oops, just as we all did.)

In a moment of temporary insanity, BoomTown actually clicked the follow button for Kutcher.

What can I say? I like “Punk’d” and want Larry King to go down like a ton of bricks.

Now I am officially worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (”G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

If you are so inclined, here’s a chart of the situation now from chartbeat, with the numbers ticking up like a clock, which you can track here (click on the chart to make it larger):

While we wait, here is a video of the famous haircutting scene from “G.I. Jane”:

We consider Jill Sobule to be the musical muse of ATD–which we desperately need since we are obviously way, way too jacked into the matrix.

That’s precisely why we have the gifted singer-songwriter appear annually at our D: All Things Digital conference–to kick off each day’s sessions with one of her songs and, more to the point, add a lot of much-needed levity and nontechie soul to the proceedings.

And tomorrow, Sobule’s Internet-funded album, “California Years,” produced by the legendary Don Was, debuts. I urge everyone to click the link here and get a copy–online, of course.

And by Internet-funded, I mean that the $75,000 needed to produce the album was raised entirely through an innovative Web initiative Sobule ginned up in late 2007 via a site called Jill’s Next Record.

Sobule wrote about the effort several times in our Voices section, where you can read about her asking for ideas here, launching her fund-raising site here and, finally, talking about the result here.

Sobule (pictured here in cartoon form)–whose big mainstream hit a few years ago was a much-better-than-hopelessly-dopey-Katy-Perry “I Kissed a Girl”–had worked her way through four record labels (she was dropped by two and two went belly-up) with six CDs.

Sick and tired of the way musical artists had their work funded, she essentially asked her fans to become her record label, writing on her site: “It would be a sort of patronage thing, where you guys are the Medici family, except I give you prizes for donations of certain amounts.”

The $1,000 “platinum” level, for example, got the donor a theme song and the $5,000 “diamond” level got a house concert by Sobule.

And what her fans are getting now in the completed album is superb–a sometimes funny, sometimes sad and always moving work. (My young sons cannot stop singing her perfect song, “San Francisco,” for example.)

As Sobule writes:

“‘California Years’ was written over the last three years, following my move to the West Coast. It was influenced by the sights and sounds of the Golden State, especially the seductive, but not always sunny Los Angeles. Maybe the next record will be ‘The Utah Month’ or ‘Back to Brooklyn.’

“The whole thing was made possible by a small but mighty fan base. They gave me the love, encouragement and the dough to do this. I was truly surprised and so very grateful. This record is for them.”

Let’s cheer on efforts like Sobule’s and hope for a hit. Because hers is indeed a small but mighty effort, as all kinds of content creators try to figure out businesses in the new digital age, unafraid of the changes inevitably coming (AP might want to take notes about this).

Here is Sobule in a long interview on NPR last week (which you cannot embed, bad NPR!) and another video below on CNN about her digital project:

And here are two videos I did with her about the effort. The first has one of the songs on the new album, called “Nothing to Prove,” and the other an update on what she wants to do next, digitally and musically speaking:

As BoomTown reported earlier today, AOL was abuzz with the rumors that former execs from the online service’s glory days, including still controversial former CEO Steve Case (pictured here), might make an appearance at a huge staff pep rally called by its new CEO Tim Armstrong.

And so Case did show up in front of a cheering crowd this morning, along with former AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis.

Considering that many at Time Warner (TWX), which owns AOL, still harbor resentment towards Case about the disastrous merger between it and AOL a half-decade ago, the move is groundbreaking for the troubled online service and perhaps a sign that it is finally time to move forward.

In related news, Sasquatch will appear on the Time Warner-owned CNN’s “Larry King Live” show tonight.

The appearance by Case took place on AOL’s former HQ in Dulles, Virginia, on the tented lawn of the sprawling campus for the company, which only a decade ago was the dominant online powerhouse.

The event was broadcast to the AOL empire worldwide, reaching thousands of employees, and included all of AOL’s top execs and several from Time Warner, such as General Counsel Paul Cappuccio and CFO John Martin.

Leonsis, who gave a “lucky” green tie to Armstrong, engendered cheers as he spoke of the importance of change.

But it was Case’s entry that was a shock to the standing-room only audience of 1,000. He told the crowd that he would be a “cheerleader on the sidelines” for AOL.

Both Case and Leonsis talked about putting the past behind the service–and there is a lot of past to put behind, I might add, between AOL and the media giant–and were very supportive of Armstrong.

Armstrong, who was a key advertising exec at Google (GOOG), made the point of joking that Case and Leonsis were “on the payroll” at AOL again.

Armstrong focused mostly on AOL products, rather than its troubled history, employee morale and the importance of reviving the famous but tarnished brand.

And to get AOLers jazzed again about reviving the service, Armstrong asked rhetorically: “Are you committed to putting America back online?”

BoomTown has finally gotten used to the silly gee-gaws television networks use on election night, like touchscreen maps and drawing all over the screen and jump-up numbers.

But one used by CNN last night–a hologram of various people beamed into the studio to look like they were with Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper–was downright freaky.

Using lots of high-definition cameras, fancy computers and, I guess, magic, CNN reporter Jessica Yellin (see video below) was the first one to get the “Star Trek” treatment, beaming in from Chicago to New York.

Later, hip-hop musician Will.i.am was beamed in and preferred a “Star Wars” analogy. But the encounter was still kind of awkward, although you honestly could not look away either, as you can see from the video below (also coming in from Chicago).

Jessica Yellin:

Will.i.am:

Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.

Indeed, Walt Mossberg and I, as well as the rest of the ATD team, are thrilled that Peter is coming onboard at the end of October. He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City.

Walt and I have long wanted to bring in someone located on the East Coast and away from the echo chamber that Silicon Valley can be, because we both feel the ongoing digital revolution is taking place over a number of key industries all over this country and the world.

Peter was our first choice and has been on my must-read list since I began this blog. He is sharp, witty, confident and has the kind of reporting and writing chops that we think are key to giving readers high-quality, standards-based content they can trust.

With extensive connections across the media, advertising, entertainment and tech sectors, Peter will be doing original reporting, getting scoops, doing interviews, making videos and providing much needed and clear-headed analysis that he is so well known for.

Peter has worked at SAI since mid-2007. The first hire at the start-up tech business analysis site, he has focused on enterprise and beat reporting, as well as breaking news.

Previously, he spent 10 years as a reporter and editor at Forbes and Forbes.com covering media and technology. There he launched two tech columns, coordinated the video staff and represented Forbes on industry panels and in TV appearances for CNN, BBC and CNBC.

Peter was also a staff reporter with City Business in Minneapolis and a staff writer for the Minnesota Real Estate Journal in Bloomington from 1993 to 1997. Earlier, he was a stringer with the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel in Madison, Wis.

He holds a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

More importantly, Peter is a newly-minted father, which should give him more practice in prolonged sleep deprivation needed for his blogging.

He will begin at ATD on Oct. 27.

Along with Walt and me, Peter joins senior news editor John Paczkowski, author of the rocking Digital Daily column, who formerly wrote the award-winning blog, “Good Morning Silicon Valley” at the San Jose Mercury News, and Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Boehret, who writes the most excellent weekly Mossberg Solution column.

We hope you are as thrilled as we are that Peter is coming soon to the ATD site.

(And if you want a little taste of Peter’s work, here’s a post he did yesterday on an appearance by Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes at the Goldman Sachs media conference and another on Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. [News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site].)

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next weeks in this column.

Here’s Part 4 of 4 of an interview I did with Time Warner’s CEO, Jeff Bewkes.

(I will be posting one video part of the discussion with Bewkes every day this week through today.)

As you will see, Bewkes is a live wire, sassing me about the hard time I was giving him about the rough road AOL has had as a Time Warner (TWX) property.

In this video, Bewkes takes questions from the audience about CNN, Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs, Bebo, content, the greening of Time Warner and he also gets in a stats tussle with Yahoo’s media head Scott Moore (pictured here).

OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?

With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.

You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.

Yesterday, you could feel the testiness jump right over the phone from several people close to Microsoft whom I spoke to about Yahoo’s latest gambit to sell its blue-sky growth plan to Wall Street.

Like a lot of Yahoo’s various moves of late–dating promiscuously with other suitors, handing out pricey severance plans to all employees and continuing to spurn the advances of the software giant without a raise in its $31-a-share bid–the projections by Yahoo (YHOO) that its sunny future warranted at least $40 a share were not taken well in Redmond.

In fact, the company–although it may ultimately have to–is quite adamant about not raising the price. “Sooner or later, they’ll run out of things to do,” said one Microsoft (MSFT) exec.

Sooner would be better, as paying $40 a share would add about $12 billion more the the $41 billion price tag, which would make it one of the biggest tech mergers in history if consummated.

But for the same high, high price, why not take all that money and buy AOL and the giant media conglomerate attached to it?

Yes, I mean Time Warner! Home of AOL and Harry Potter!

This thought occurred to me as I watched the stock of Time Warner (TWX) drift further downward over the last weeks, even though it has tried to give itself a shot in the digital arm by paying $850 million in cash to buy the Bebo social network.

Current price tag for the whole ball of TWX: $51.5 billion. (Of course, debt brings the price up to about $85 billion to $87 billion, but this is just a fantasy, so indulge me.)

And for that you not only get the relatively decent AOL online ad network, you also get a social network in Bebo (No. 3, but Microsoft has only a tiny piece of Facebook), the powerful AIM instant messaging service, a just-as-famous brand name in need of some TLC, some nice Web properties and, best of all, a chance to shove out Google (GOOG) from its search-ad relationship with AOL (Google owns 5% of the unit, which it bought for $1 billion).

Plus, all kinds of stuff you can either keep or spin off: powerful cable assets, top-notch television and movie studios (those cool “Entourage” guys on HBO!), the biggest magazine company (People, Sports Illustrated!), cable networks (Anderson Cooper and Larry King on CNN) and much, much more.

Frankly, compared to Yahoo, Time Warner kind of feels like a bargain, and they know from getting taken over by digital types.

Years ago, as I reported in my book, “aol.com,” Microsoft Co-Founder and longtime leader Bill Gates once said to AOL Founder and then-CEO Steve Case in 1993: “I can buy 20% of you or I can buy all of you. Or I can go into this business myself and bury you.”

How ironic would it be if that promise finally came true?