Under the old rules of Twitter tradition, you "re-tweeted" another user by placing the letters "RT" before the quote and after any commentary you yourself added, like so:

If you use the new built-in re-tweet system, the original tweet would be copied into your stream under the byline of the original tweeter, like so:

The obvious problem: You lose the ability to actually say anything about what you're quoting if you use the new system. Also, all your followers are going to get a strange and potentially confusing avatar of someone they're not subscribed to in their stream.

On the bright side, this system is great for Twitter Inc. "Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data," Twitter CEO Evan Williams writes in a blog post about the new re-tweeting feature. Indeed, the feature offers a metric with which to rank tweets and thereby the results of Twitter searches and Twitter users themselves. Twitter could sell this data, provided free by its users, to the richest and most favored bidders, just like the microblogging startup did with the actual content of tweets.

The feature also helps Twitter's celebrity power users. Writes Williams:

RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

But, hey, if you don't like this new re-tweet thing that is so awesome for celebrities and Twitter Inc., you can always opt out. As Williams writes (emphasis from original), "you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually)." So just click "OFF" 200 times? Sounds super-easy!

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone, by Mathieu Thouvenin.)

Earlier today, a large number of hard-core Twitter dorks — sorry, "influencers!" — noticed DeGeneres was following their accounts. Many were flattered, followed back and tweeted about it. "I am looking fwd to being a guest... now that she is following me," one wrote. But DeGeneres wasn't making friends; she was on a rampage. Near the start of the spamming, she was following 6,100, according to the notification one influencer received after DeGeneres followed him (see below, with the name changed). Within a couple of hours, she was up to nearly 6,700.

How did DeGeneres suddenly find 600 geeks to follow? Closely-watched Silicon Valley blogger and marketing specialist Louis Gray figured out the answer: Lists. Of the many lists already out there, the most popular include several lists of "influencers" and "thought leaders" and so forth. In other words: A celebrity twitterer's social media "consultant's" dream, and an effective way to load up on followers without following just anyone. DeGeneres' need friends just happen to line up with those on the top lists. Go figure!

It's one thing for everyone to be famous for 15 minutes. But it's starting to look like everyone will be a fame broker for a period, too, on the internet. Maybe channeling fame will pay better than obtaining it.

Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

Microblogging might seem straightforward enough to your typical Silicon Valley office drone. But Hollywood superstars are used to things coming a bit easier in life. And PR firms like Santa Monica-based Id are ready to hold their hands on Twitter, Nicole LaPorte (disclaimer: the long-suffering wife of Gawker's Richard Rushfield) writes at the Daily Beast, and help bolster their image, or at least not wreck it.

What does Id teach? Well, only clients like Herman, Ben Stiller, and Natalie Portman know for sure, but it's possible to distill a few likely lessons from LaPorte's story:

• Make a friend at Twitter Inc. Everyone who's anyone has one. They're great for when hackers and impostors come around — or for when your problem is more old school. LaPorte: "Virtually every publicist in Hollywood has a go-to person at Twitter-the equivalent these days of having an "in" with famed MGM publicity chiefs-cum-fixers... during Hollywood's Golden Age."
  
• Latch on to current events. Just because you're a celebrity and no one really cares what you think about important issues doesn't mean you can't offer commentary. Everyone loves a clown: "The day that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Ben Stiller tweeted: 'Was awoken this morning to my daughter telling me that I had no shot at ever winning the Nobel Peace Prize.'"
  
• Launch with a crowd. A real one. Herman issued his first tweet at the 140tc Twitter Conference (see video above), thus helping ensure a bunch of re-tweets from the Twitter junkies and bigwigs in the audience and thus accelerating his microblogging popularity.

Thank goodness for flacks. Without them, celebrities would have to earn Twitter attention all on their own, with only their wildly inflated global popularity to hep them.

OMGICU has been on a campaign to bring Morgan to Twitter since Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, after collecting such stalker sightings as these:

• "tracy morgain [sic] is walking around soho eating blueberries looking confused."
• "Just saw Tracy Morgan driving a Yellow Lamborghini with a blond woman listening to Sade."
• "Tracy Morgan at the Bowery whole foods. I smiled but he gave me a mean look back. He was with a lady."

Welcome to Twitter, Tracy. Every week is Shark Week!

Oh look! He just delivered his first tweet:

Poetry.

Ingles, reports the Los Angeles Times, was then fired. But Adams can't take all the blame: Ingels had to know it was coming. If you're going to tweet about which musician didn't wear a bra in your restaurant (Ali Harter), which Office star was hungover (BJ Novak) in your restaurant and which actress looked hot (Tori Spelling) in your restaurant, you probably aren't long for that restaurant. Especially if it's located in Beverly Hills.

Update: We had Adams' name wrong in the lead.

What's especially funny about Bateman's tantrum is that she's lashing out at what's supposed to be an elite A-list: People selected first by Twitter to be part of a limited testing group for a new "re-tweeting" format, and then selected again by people Bateman follows, in the form of re-posted tweets.

When Twitter announced this feature in an August 13 blog post, it said re-tweets would now use the picture of the original tweeter, instead of the re-tweeter, but would be clearly labeled, and that one could turn the feature off. But the labeling wasn't clear enough for Bateman. After seeing repeated incoming posts from tech blogger John Gruber, since he had been re-tweeted by people she follows, Bateman called him a "shithead" and "human waste." (Gruber himself is famously an aficionado of this sort of name-calling, adding an additional wrinkle of humor to the situation.) Humorist and branding whiz Tim Siedell was dubbed a "jackass" by Bateman, who further warned,

I'm set to flame this incident all over the Internet. I suggest for the sake of your reputation on-line, YOU GET YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT TOGETHER and stop this attempt to shove your posts into other people's feeds.

Awesome.

Twitter Inc., which is still experimenting with this re-tweeting format, should keep in mind that Bateman isn't the sharpest test subject in the lab. She flipped out at rebloggers on Tumblr without taking the time to grok the blogging service's culture of quoting and of editing quotes. Later, Bateman, behind on her memes, lashed out at a fan who tried to praise her "white whine." Easily confused though Bateman may be, Twitter should probably take the time to create an "opt out" button simple and obvious enough for even her to use. Because God help you, Twitter Inc., if Mallory turns her e-guns on you.

That Twitter would describe Hollywood royalty as a "distraction" just shows the enormous cultural gap between the San Francisco startup and its associates in Southern California, where such a broad putdown of celebrities would be unthinkable at a company meeting. Notes obtained by TechCrunch show Twitter staff even called Diddy "not so strategic... Diddy values his contribution higher than we do... [Let's] get a group of people rather than concentrate on Diddy."

But Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is now spinning the incident like a veteran Tinseltown flack, declaring in an interview with VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler, "we were super impressed with how savvy [Combs] was... He has stayed relevant for so long, and how does he do it? He's constantly reinventing himself." Stone himself has staged something of a reinvention, calling up celebrities to apologize and to "tell them that these notes didn't reflect anything." Apparently Hollywood was a bit more strategic than geeky Twitter wanted to admit, and Stone will probably have to spend months groveling like this as a result.

The mommy mogul tried to explain away the suspicious incident by blaming a sign, which snuck up on the driver, in broad daylight:

If we had $5 for every time a minor collision with a flimsy stationary object had caused one of our vehicles to become engulfed in flames, we still couldn't buy anything at Starbucks.

You know, this isn't the first time freak infernos have stalked Stewart. Remember what happened to her precious puppy, Genghis Khan?

Then there was that bizarre truck accident on Stewart's estate not two months ago. A large delivery vehicle was sucked in by Stewart's deadly landscaping and nearly wrecked:

God forbid Stewart ever has firestarting deer-killer Dick Cheney over for dinner; based on the pair's collective records, the entire state would need to be preemptively evacuated.

Kutcher pointedly notes his lack of compensation in the attached clip from Monday's Tonight Show. He even mentions equity; is Kutcher hinting he'd like some pre-IPO shares in the hot microblogging startup? He's certainly put in sweat equity, and not just by uploading pictures of his scantily-clad wife: Kutcher has posted some 3,000 tweets to his 3 million followers. Oprah Winfrey, in contrast, has written just 56 tweets, to 2 million followers.

Here's how Gawker's sworn enemy explained her delight in Twitter to Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast:

"First of all, you don't have to spend any time on it, and, second of all, you reach a lot more people. And I don't have to ‘befriend' and do all that other dippy stuff that they do on Facebook."

Oh god, friendships. Those are almost as bad as actual effort! Which Stewart also loves to avoid:

"With minimal effort-and I really mean it: I spend less than five minutes a day on Twitter-I have been able to garner over 1 million followers in a 4½-month period, with very few tweets, by the way."

By shirking her social networking, Stewart allows herself more time to hang out with media sophisticates like those who host NBC's Today show. That's them laughing uproariously when Martha says everyone in the South loves to "suck on the heads" of shrimp, in the clip above.

That Martha Stewart openly and repeatedly brags about how little effort she puts into her self-promoting, 1-million-follower having Twitter stream really tells you something about why celebrities are drawn to the microblogging service. By not requiring them to "follow" their followers, it allows them to reproduce the one-way broadcast dynamics of old media.

Celebrities who try to get more engaged with the unwashed internet masses on Twitter and the like all too often find the experience unnerving. So the rest just stick with a broadcast model. Which is fine, whatever, but it just goes to show that celebrities on Twitter are more a distraction from the service's genuinely transformative uses than an example of it — and why the startup shouldn't be bending over backwards to placate them.

(Pic: Martha Stewart with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at the Webby Awards in June. Getty Images.)

Arguably Twitter's most famous adopter, Winfrey hasn't posted to the service in more than a month. Her Twitter run lasted less than two months, but who can blame her? With a daytime talk show and magazine to run, a close connection to the White House and access to Broadway and Hollywood premiers and celebs, why bother with the banality of 140-character status updates?

Winfrey did just have a 10-day birthday cruise around the Mediterranean, but hardly explains her 33-day Twitter absence. It's possible a long summer break could explain musician Dave Matthews' 24-day Twitter absence, but what's the point of a vacation if you can't rub your friends' virtual faces in all the fun you're having, via Twitter?

At least Oprah and Matthews still have their accounts; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outright deleted hers sometime after October, when she was still on the celebrity Twitter lists. Like Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn't posted to his personal account since August, Clinton is now tracked by a mysterious, impersonal "UNOFFICIAL TWITTER."

But of course, being on Twitter isn't any of these people's jobs. Not so with Jennifer Preston, the New York Times' Social Media Editor., who was called out this morning (by new-media zealot Jeff Jarvis, naturally) for going a full month without tweeting. Well, we kinda should have figured: Preston only recently unlocked her tweets, then promptly declared she's be "listening more than tweeting," while figuring out how to clamp down on tweeting by others.

But you can't even pay some people to tweet, is the point!

(Top pic via)

Michael Jackson's service drew, at its peak, about 2.8 million video and audio streams through the network of content middleman Akamai, versus around 350,000 on a normal day. It was almost entirely Americans watching; apparently the rest of the world was more interested in nuclear disarmament or mass ethnic uprising or whatever.

Back in the U.S., Facebook reported it was handling 6,000 status updates per minute, fueled by more than 300,000 viewers on a joint CNN/Facebook video console. Jackson chatter dominated and slowed Twitter.

In unrelated news, underemployment just pushed the average U.S. workweek to a record low of 33 hours while the jobless rate reached 9.5 percent.

The hidden cuss at left, by the way, is "Redonkeydick." Only 41 posts and Silverman's already been censored by Twitter.

(For some reason Silverman hasn't linked to the the re-release of her 2004 mockumentary "Pilot Season." It's pretty good, for a free eight-minute internet thing!)

[Twitter via TV Tattle]

Bateman already posts literally dozens of times per day to her Tumblr. Not that we're judging, but she wants to throw up even more content, via her BlackBerry, a setup that wasn't working out for her initially:

Grrrr. My Tumblr account won't stay signed-in on my Blackberry.

This prompted a reblog from photographer Mo Pitz, who added:

Might be the white whine of the week…

Indeed! But Bateman was not amused, and wrote a post titled "Interesting that you feel I'm WHINING." Ouch:

I don't remember sending out invitations. Feel free to Unfollow. Top right corner.

Don't be like that, 'Mals — it was totally supposed to be a compliment. Now you gave Mo a sad, amplified by the power of your celebrity:

Ohhhh, no… sorry. I didn't mean that as an insult…it was a joke. I thought it was a fairly common tumblr meme. Eek.

Kind of a big general internet meme, actually. But give Bateman time: At 30+ posts a day on her laptop and 'Berry, she's bound to get the hang of all your basic stupid memes eventually, and will thus have wasted as much of her brain as the rest of us on Tumblr.

Her Tumblr is at "tanya77" dot tumblr dot com, but it's definitely Bateman. She likes to take pictures of herself, sometimes shouts out her production company, and her RSS feed is captioned "Everything is going to happen. Justine Bateman said so."

And the actress-turned-screenwriter has a lot of time on her hands. On Wednesday she posted and reblogged 32 times; on Tuesday, 36. She even blogged during a Screen Actors Guild meeting.

But Bateman is still getting the feel for Tumblr culture. Content is copied, respliced and remixed frequently on the blogging service, as Bateman's own reblogs show. The actress gets touchy when it happens to her. "I don't like it when people edit my posts," she recently declared. "If you want to reblog me, please don’t remove or change my comments.... Please unfollow me if this is upsetting or difficult."

If Tumblr doesn't work out for Bateman, she can always retreat into her Twitter.

Next step for nerd Mallory of the 21st Century: Dating Skippy.

(OK, that was mean. We're really just jealous she's following Balk.)