If you weren’t paying attention to anything but important news today you might not have noticed that Ashton Kutcher had turned over his tweeting privileges to the social media division of his company Katalyst Media. “But why?,” you ask, because it’s late and you’re wasting time on the Internet even though you’re super busy or should be sleeping.

Well because Kutcher, who has about eight million more followers than you or I ever will, tweeted out something without thinking last night and, because they’re a bunch of maladjusted ugly troll people, the media pounced on him — because he’s pretty. And more importantly because what he said was really really stupid; he wondered why Penn State coach Joe Paterno  was fired, when the reason he was fired was like, everywhere on Twitter. Dude, where’s my excuse?

We’re all trigger happy when it comes to social media. I tweet and text the wrong people insane shit at all hours of the night just because I have the technology  – true confession (IHTM). And herein lies the trouble with Twitter; You (and Rep. Anthony Weiner) think it’s like texting, not realizing that your intelligible only-in-context tweet/text/whatever is now broadcast to an audience of 40K or 8 million of your closest followers. This explains Ashton’s admittedly ignorant tweet, and this other tweet of his, and some of my tweets and some of your tweets if you’re being honest with yourself.

We’re human! Pobody’s nerfect.

Earlier today I asked our new fancy Facebook sociologist writer Josh Constine, who went to Stanford so you know he’s smart because I got rejected from there, “Like what’s up with that?” about this whole mess. He said, “It’s bigger than Ashton,” explaining that because the act of tweeting was so much like texting it was more prone to human error than let’s say the act of posting to Facebook or LinkedIn. For the record I’ve never booty LinkedIn-messaged anyone.

But wait, before this gets out of hand, let’s all take a second to reflect on the Huffington Post’s seminal piece “Fired Over Twitter: 13 Tweets That Got People CANNED” or something. Bish please, that “canned” is in ALL CAPS so you know it’s IMPORTANT.

Despite the clear risk of unfettered communication, by relinquishing editorial control over his feed to a collective process Ashton is playing it way safe. He basically ran back to the comfortable confines of old media, an act which was very “un-Internet” of him, I guess.

“As of immediately I will stop tweeting until I find a way to properly manage this feed,” he wrote, “I feel awful about this error. Won’t happen again.” His solution was to hand Katalyst Media the keys to his social media kingdom, so it can vet his tweets or something, which sounds so sad. I’d rather have someone mess up every three months than be boring.

I’ve never particularly been a fan of Kutcher, but I’m a pretty big fan of self-expression, even if you screw up big time. The most brilliant people are totally hated yo. Ashton, it’s not your fault that Twitter, and society, wasn’t prepared for such a disparate “one to many” ratio. So even if you were stupid and pressed send too soon, there is no Facebook or Twitter post you can’t recover from. So do it, please. You owe all those people who pressed ‘Follow’ under a certain pretense at least that.

Image: @Aplusk

Tech investor Ashton Kutcher took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today to talk with Michael Arrington to talk about his investments and participation in the technology community. Interestingly enough, Kutcher’s art is actually imitating his life, he will be playing tech investor Walden Schmidt in CBS’ “Two and a Half Men” — Schmidt, like Kutcher, is also a tech investor, a dot-com entrepreneur who sold his company to Microsoft and now invests in tech startups.

When asked by Michael Arrington, “Why do you invest?” Kutcher talked about gaining perspective on where technology is heading by asking, “What would happen if a pilgrim had seen a computer in action?” They would have thought it was black magic, he said, comparing investors to people on the lookout for that magic, “We’re on a witch hunt looking for the thing that is so magic you can’t understand how it works,” he said.

Kutcher said that his personal curiosity and interest in technology fundamentally stemmed from an interest in how magic tricks worked and from a desire to increase the sum total of human happiness.

“I realty think that technology has the greatest potential to accelerate happiness of most things in the world. The companies that will ultimately do well are the companies that chase happiness,” Kutcher said. “If you find a way to help people find love, or health or friendship, the dollar will chase that.”

Kutcher currently has 40 investments, the majority of which are not disclosed because disclosing that Kutcher is an investor is sometimes detrimental to the story of a company, he said. He said he became an investor in TechCrunch Disrupt presenter Amen because it ultimately increased human connectivity by encouraging human conflict.

Interestingly enough, Kutcher relayed an anecdote about his dream portfolio while on stage, saying that he had plastered stickers of his “dream portfolio” companies on his “Two and a Half Men” character’s (Walden Schmidt’s) laptop. According to Kutcher, CBS nixed the laptop sticker idea because they didn’t want to promote any companies that hadn’t paid for that promotion.

Kutcher, bringing up the notion of engaging community, made it clear that he thought that was the wrong decision.

Whose tweets lead to more actual sales, Ashton Kutcher’s or Kevin Rose’s? The answer is not immediately obvious. Kutcher boasts 7.3 million Twitter followers to Rose’s 1.3 million, but a recent promotion run by design shopping site Fab.com suggests that raw numbers don’t always translate to more sales.

Both Kutcher and Rose recently tweeted out a link that gave their followers $10 off any purchase at Fab.com. Fab wrote a blog post about the marketing test. Kutcher’s link resulted in 5,888 signups, more than Rose’s 4,356 (but not much more). But Rose’s links resulted in more orders and higher revenues.

More of Rose’s followers passed the link along, and they also ordered more. On the first day of the promotion, Kutcher’s followers placed 45 orders, compared to 30 for Rose’s followers. But daily orders from Kutcher’s followers peaked at 75, whereas Rose’s peaked at 158 a week later (see chart, Rose’s is the yellowish line). In terms of total sales, Rose brought in $7,121 versus only $2,183 for Kutcher.

These are exactly the kind of metrics more startups should be reporting. They get at the value per share, and are much more useful than the usual vanity metrics startups put out all too regularly. Both Kutcher and Rose are investors in Fab, which recently switched from being a gay social network to a shopping site.

Using celebrities to promote sales is a growing trend in social commerce. Gilt recently tapped into Lady Gaga fans and One Kings Lane did a promotion with designers from a Bravo show.

According to several sources Airbnb is in the process of closing a whopper of a funding round: $100 million or more at a $1 billion-plus valuation. The round is being lead by Andreessen Horowitz, and includes participation from DST, say our sources.

That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date.

No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan.

Airbnb has become the sleeper hit of the startup world. It’s one of those companies plenty of well-heeled investors passed on in the early days, because they thought no one would want to open his or her home to strangers. Out of twenty angels he pitched in 2008, founder Brian Chesky said half didn’t return his emails and most of the others told him it was an awful idea. Even Paul Graham hated it, but he liked Chesky and backed him hoping he’d change the company. TechCrunch’s own hotel expert Paul Carr was a cynic too.

Now, the fear of missing another Airbnb is palpable in the Valley, and one of the reasons GetAround became the darling, audience choice and winner of our Disrupt conference this week.

Earlier in the week, I sat down with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky to talk about this reversal in fortune and how the business is going, although at the time we hadn’t heard the details of the deal he was busy negotiating. Check it out below.

Ashton Kutcher started dabbling in tech startups a few years ago, but he is no longer a dabbler, as his his Disrupt interview with Charlie Rose last week made clear. Kutcher is an investor in a dozen tech companies, including Skype, Foursquare, Path, and Kevin Rose’s Milk. In this backstage interview with Sarah Lacy, he reveals that he is also an investor in Airbnb (whose CEO Brian Chesky was also at Disrupt) and why he thinks the company is different.

Kutcher talks about his approach to investing in startups. At first it was very much a leraning process for him. “I became an apprentice” to other tech investors, he says, because “I don’t like to fail.”

Will investing become more of a hobby now that he is about to start a full-time job replacing Charlie Sheen on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men? Not at all, he says. Sitcom hours are much more predictable than movie-set hours. You can expect Kutcher to keep investing.

Moore and Kutcher’s solution? Raise awareness and take action, like reporting any suspicious ads you see on Craigslist or Backpage.

In order to spread the word, the actress and actor/angel investor have leveraged their Hollywood connections to get Justin Timberlake, Sean Penn, Bradley Cooper, Jamie Foxx and even “Old Spice Guy” Isaiah Mustafa to make these silly silly videos. Notable personalities like media cyclone Arianna Huffington have also added their visages to the mix (she’s at the end of Kutcher’s video).

Where Dorsey comes is in that DNA has actually partnered with tech companies like Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft in order to come up with ways to reduce the 76% of sex trade transactions that take place online. Microsoft for example is working on something called Photo DNA, which identifies and tags pornographic images, allowing service providers to remove all their replications simultaneously.

The initiative also includes a Facebook campaign which allows users to have their picture added to the gallery of “Real Men” and “Women Who Prefer Real Men,” as well as take part in the video. I really wish they would rig it so Eva Langoria would say my name though, just like they did with Dorsey. I’d love to hear her try to pronounce “Tsotsis.”

Kutcher is an investor in Flipboard, Blekko, Path and  Zaarly among other other things.

Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi have all been included. And some of their write-ups are really interesting because of their authors. For example, Moot is written up by the man perhaps now best known for being the “Rick” in the “Rick Roll”, Rick Astley. The “Twitter Guys” (founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) are written up by Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter user with a million followers. And Jeff Bezos is written up by Bill Gates.

Here’s a line from the Twitter story that will no doubt infuriate those that hate Twitter:

Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

In his profile of Moot, Astley admits that at first he was a bit embarrassed by the phenomenon of Rick Rolling, but then embraced it. Oddly, he spends almost the entire article talking about himself. He also uses the word “bonkers.” 4chan dominated the online voting portion for the Time 100 list, to win it easily and his followers even manipulated the 20 runners-up to make a joke. But Time kept its promise to honor the winner.

[photo: Robyn Twomey for TIME]

With that in mind, tomorrow, Kutcher, with his nearly 1.4 million followers, and Digg’s Kevin Rose, with his over 500,000 followers, along with other notable users plan to use to Twitter as a platform to further the cause. The message they will send out is simple: “Every 30 seconds a child dies from Malaria. Nets save lives. Support World Malaria Day = http://bit.ly/30Io8“

Just from those two users, the tweet has the potential to be seen nearly 2 million times on Twitter. But the real power will come when people start retweeting the message. Savvy Twitter users will know that retweeting (copying a message to all of your followers that someone else sent) has become the key to sending a viral message on Twitter. And given the celebrity angle, mixed with a good cause, I think it’s a pretty good bet this may be one of the most retweeted messages ever for the service.

And we’ll play along, because it is a good cause. And if you feel like doing your part, send out the message above tomorrow as well, or retweet it. More importantly, if you’re able, donate to the cause to buy nets to help save children in Africa.

Ashton Kutcher stopped by TC50 to represent and show off blahgirls.com. The Blah Girls are an animated clique of girls that comment on entertainment and celebrity gossip. Landing somewhere between South Park and the Powerpuff Girls, the humor is delivered in the form of a blog and a video that is updated twice weekly.

Interactivity is seen to be a big part of the site, but still has a way to go. For example, users can type in a question that the Blah Girls supposedly answer, but the response is pretty pat and standard. About as trustworthy as a Magic 8 Ball. Still, with enough fodder and the right software, the Blah Girls could create the illusion of individually answering those (hopefully not too) burning questions that teenagers need to ask.

Revenue is generated not only by traditional advertising, but also by product placement. As you can see from the screenshot, it’s pretty subtle and hard to tell that you’re looking at an ad at all. Well, maybe their ad integration needs a little work too, but one thing for sure is we’ll be seeing a lot more of this type of advertising as this model gains steam.

Figueroa intends to rock some “legal activation” on the TC network, so look for us all on CourtTV in a few weeks.

Being Stupid And Litigious Is No Way To Go Through Life [TechCrunch]

The VoIP ideal has been around, and VoIP to VoIP calls are almost always free. Calling to a traditional landline, though, has some costs associated with it (per-call or monthly). It’s these costs that have added up and made problems for other VoIP providers. Ooma has come up with a fairly innovative way to literally skirt these costs, and it could make all the difference.

Ooma is free to use. You’ll need to buy its proprietary hardware, and at $399 it’s something of a significant investment. But when you consider all of your phone calls (within the USA) from your home phone will be free forever, consider it a down payment on your future.

Most traditional landline to VoIP hardware consists of a centralized switch that contains the actual magic. Ooma uses a base station and “satellite” switches (called Scouts) to de-centralize your Home Phone Network (I’m trademarking that, don’t try it).

Most traditional landline to VoIP providers also dial you into the nearest neighborhood switch, which are spaced in urban areas every half-mile or so, and in rural areas every few miles, no matter how close the person you’re calling is.

Ooma, though, likes to go peer-to-peer. Your Ooma base station doesn’t just allow you to make calls, it helps others make theirs. If there’s another Ooma base station closer to the person you’re calling than a switch, then it’s used instead. Rad.

If enough people start using Ooma over the Internet, eventually the public phone network will be used less and less. Peer-to-peer is definitely the future of the Internet, and Ooma might prove it’s the future of all communications.

Ooma launches tomorrow morning, and it’s viral marketing team is being headed up by a little-known actor named Ashton Kutcher (whom this dude Arrington is interviewing for our TalkCrunch sister site). You’ll be hearing a lot about it soon.

Look for an MTV-crowd push (does MTV-crowd mean anything anymore? I’m over 30, I wouldn’t know) all over the place, with upcoming pay-to-download features being added to match thsoe of some cellphones (ringtones, for example, and impossible-to-play games).

Add to that the impressive line-up of coaches that the company has assembled and these guys have become one to watch. Check them out tomorrow morning.

Ooma [Product Site]