Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is certainly giving her Facebook fan page a workout this week, as she nears one million fans.

Using the site to flack her new book, “Going Rogue,” which comes out officially today, it got a big boost from her interview today with Oprah Winfrey, clocking in at close to 995,000 fans last night.

Posts include info on her multipart interview with Barbara Walters, her unhappiness with the recent cover of her in running clothes in Newsweek magazine (“The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.”) and, of course, how the media were unfairly attacking her.

Interestingly, Palin’s followers for the book in Twitter (#SarahPalinUSA) number a paltry 17,624.

Still, Palin has other Twitter accounts, such as when she was governor of Alaska (153,432), but this is still a very small audience.

(By the way, President Barack Obama is closing in on seven million fans on Facebook and 2.7 million followers on Twitter.)

As the media onslaught gains steam, here is some video of Palin’s television interview on “Oprah” yesterday:

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”:

Fresh from his puppy dog-esque, “Oprah” interview, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made good use of the press the television talk show appearance engendered to hawk his wares, most especially new features the hot social networking-site has been coming out with of late.

Including some that look suspiciously like Twitter, the hot microblogging service that has hip-checked Facebook out as the new “in” thing in Silicon Valley and which declined Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt last year.

But what tool did the ever-clever Zuckerberg also use yesterday to flack his products?

Twitter, of course!

Imitation is, of course, the sincerest form of flattery. But the posting by him (finkd) and also PR honchette Brandee Barker (facebookbrandee) does give new meaning to the word: coopetition.

Here are Zuckerberg’s and Barker’s tweets today, as well as part of the Oprah Winfrey interview–well, more a lovefest for the tie-wearing (please stop taking him shopping, Brandee!) and unusually loquacious Zuckerberg–below:

At its EconCeleb conference in Hollywood today, ContentNext released its list of the most influential and innovative online celebrities today.

It is an interesting and varied list that includes everyone from powerhouse Oprah (pictured here, of course!) to the bisexual sprite, Tila Tequila.

The list, in ascending order:

10. Martha Stewart (she is actually a closet geek)

9. Tila Tequila (vile, but in a good way)

8. Peter Gabriel (a longtime Web pioneer in the digital music space)

7. Radiohead (innovative band pushing Web distribution boundaries)

6. Stephen Colbert (funny online and off)

5. 50 Cent (the urban rap artist as nerd)

4. Oprah Winfrey (um, she’s runs the real world and could run the Internet if she felt like it)

3. Ashton Kutcher (not just a pretty face, but one who gets the power of viral marketing)

2. Will.i.am (for that Barack Obama mashup video alone)

1. Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy & Adam McKay (FunnyOrDie.com might not make money, but it is very funny)

Last month, it was $850 million in cash for social-networking site Bebo.

And, today, it’s a much smaller slug for Sphere, which started as a blog search engine and morphed into a widely distributed “contextually relevant” content engine, used on news and blog sites across the Web (and which AllThingsD uses on this site, in fact).

While one source said the price was upward of $25 million, sources at other companies to whom the San Francisco-based start-up also talked, including Google (GOOG), said Sphere was looking for more than that.

In any case, the sale is surely a win for CEO and Co-Founder of Sphere Tony Conrad, a longtime entrepreneur who also has been a VC at True Ventures, which also invested in Sphere.

Oh, it’s a mosh pit of jolly interbreeding in the Web 2.0 start-up world!

Sphere raised about $4.25 million from many investors, some of which included Radar Partners, Trident Capital and well-known Web players Scott Kurnit and Will Hearst.

AOL has surely shown a knack for snapping up small and innovative properties with clever technologies–the Truveo video search engine and communications app maker Userplane, for example–and has let them stay relatively intact, as it has promised it will do with Sphere.

But it also has not exactly leveraged any of them in a massive way either and still faces the problem of holding onto talent from those start-ups, as BoomTown reported here.

One hopes that AOL can do more with the more complex and elegant Sphere, which has deep relationships with major publishers all over the Web, including many Time Warner properties like Time.com and CNN.

It would be a shame for Sphere to fall into one of AOL’s deep holes there.

But perhaps not, given all the frenetic multitasking activity at AOL of late, including yesterday, when it also announced a deal in which its Platform-A online ad division would sell ads for Verizon (VZ) on the Web and for its mobile units.

Oh, and its top execs, CEO Randy Falco and President Ron Grant, whom AOL sources tell me have been AWOL of late, have also been ferreting away on a possible deal to be the alternative for Yahoo (YHOO) in its takeover battle with Microsoft (MSFT).

While Yahoo troops are not really happy with such a union, as BoomTown reported here, neither are some top Time Warner execs at the possibility that AOL might simply be being used as a stalking horse by Yahoo, in an effort to get Microsoft to up its bid.

“Do you think they’re using us?” joked one Time Warner exec to me yesterday, given the deal activity seemed to have slowed down this week.

Um, yes, of course!

While that wouldn’t be sporting, if Yahoo does end up going to Microsoft, it just means AOL will need to get a lot more energetic and do a lot more Spheres in the future to keep up.