In what could have been a sequel to one of his own smash television shows, Ashton Kutcher played celebrity-geek this week as he launched an irreverent gossip website for girls.

Katalyst Media partners Kutcher and Jason Goldberg made a pilgrimage from Hollywood to debut the Blah Girls at a TechCrunch50 gathering of promising technology startup firms in northern California.

The interactive online cartoon program launched at www.blahgirls.com features three young female characters that dish the dirt on celebrities and pop culture in unabashed girl talk.

An online social networking component of the program aimed at teenage girls lets viewers chime in with comments and exchange emails with Blah Girls whose responses are personalized with artificial intelligence software.

“There are plenty of gossip sites, but ours is an original take written from the perspective of the teenage girl,” Kutcher told AFP in an interview at TechCrunch50.

“It is not potshots at famous people. It is humor that takes on the notion of fandom. I think girls will appreciate these characters are reacting and talking back to them.”

Kutcher and Goldberg say their first online endeavor stems from their success reaching teenage audiences with television programs such as “Punk’d” and “Beauty and the Geek.”

“It feels like a natural extension, but a very different avenue,” Goldberg said of setting out with Kutcher on what they hope will be the first of a series of increasingly interactive online shows.

Katalyst is tuned into the teenage demographics and companies interested in reaching that segment of the market. Kutcher and Goldberg came to TechCrunch50 to connect with people adept at the latest Internet technologies.

“We know our weaknesses,” Kutcher said as he gestured toward technology startups demonstrating slick new offerings in a cavernous San Francisco Design Center.

“We are the babies here. We are surrounded by people that know more about this business than what we know.”

Sponsors of the three-day startup confab include technology giants Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace and Norton from Symantec.

Startups vying to be crowned hottest offering at the event bore names such as Tweegee, Yammer, Twingz, Grokit, and Akoha.

BriteClick showed off a tool that lets people search the Internet without ever leaving a desired web page. For example, someone reading a news story could learn more about terms by simply highlighting them in the article.

“It understands the website you are on and what you are trying to do,” said Dan Lee of BriteClick.

“It gives you more information in less time.”

Startup Qik, which lets people easily stream live video from mobile telephones to social networking web pages or other websites, was among those that caught Kutcher’s interest.

Snap Page displayed tools that would let typical people create professional looking websites.

And MobNotes showed off a network that lets people keep track of where they and friends have been and are going at any given moment of the day using the Internet and mobile device messaging.

“New technology spills out of conferences like this,” Kutcher said. “I’m a bit of a geek about it. Learning keeps you from getting old.”

The New York Giants and New York Jets had the biggest increase in value in Forbes Magazine’s annual ranking of NFL franchises, each jumping 21 percent because of their new stadium.

And the stadium where they’ll both play isn’t scheduled to open until the 2010 season.

The Giants moved from eighth to fourth in the rankings released Wednesday, valued at $1.178 billion, behind Dallas ($1.612 billion), Washington ($1.538 billion) and New England ($1.324 billion), the perennial leaders. The Jets are right behind them in fifth with a value of $1.178 billion.

Indianapolis made the biggest jump in the rankings, going from 21st to eighth because their new stadium is opening this year. The Colts are valued at $1.076 billion.

The magazine also found that for the first time in any sport, team values averaged $1 billion. Ten years ago, when it first started keeping track, the average value of an NFL team was $288 million.

Forbes attributes the increase primarily to new stadiums as well as increased sponsorship deals.

The rest of the top 10 included Houston at No. 6 ($1.125 billion); Philadelphia No. 7 ($1.116 billion); Chicago at No. 9 ($1.064 billion); and Baltimore at No. 10 ($1.062 billion).

In all, 19 teams were valued at more than $1 billion.

The value for the top teams also correlates more than in the past with success on the field.

The Giants are the reigning Super Bowl champions; the Colts won in 2007; Baltimore won in 2001; the Patriots have won three titles this decade; the Bears and Eagles have played in recent Super Bowls; and Dallas had the NFC’s best record last season at 13-3.

Minnesota, Oakland and San Francisco, all with aging stadiums, were at the bottom of the chart.

When Jason Harrison joined global communications firm Universal McCann as its CIO in 2006, he was asked by the company’s executives to find a way to better connect the 3,000 employees spread out across more than 60 locations around the world. The usual tools, mainly email and telephone, hadn’t yielded the results the company wanted in terms of building a common company culture.

The company’s IT infrastructure was heavily Microsoft-based, with the 2003 version of SharePoint already installed and the 2007 SharePoint on the way. With the latter, Harrison knew that Microsoft had added social software capabilities to SharePoint, including MySites, social networking profiles for the enterprise.

Harrison decided to start with social networking, and has since built a social network mixing the built-in social tools of the SharePoint platform with technology from NewsGator, a vendor that offers enterprise Real Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology that streams relevant information to employees over portals such as corporate intranets. In this case, such information is centered around industry news and deals with Universal McCann’s clients, which include large corporations such as Sony, Johnson & Johnson and Exxon Mobile.

“We wanted everyone to feel one culture and one set of objectives,” Harrison says. “Because we’re so distributed, we had to build a common social fabric virtually.”

Last November, when Google launched Open Social we asked readers if Facebook would join Google’s platform. The results were split right down the middle, but as we get farther from the Open Social launch, and the two sites continue to launch competing APIs (Google FriendConnect vs. Facebook Connect, for example — the former banned by Facebook), that seems less and less likely. This is becoming a social networking cold war according to Duncan Riley.

Even though the battle for social networking supremacy is a fight between Facebook and MySpace, the social networking arms race is really being played out between Facebook and Google. Google has demonstrated the unique ability to bring rival social networks together around its proposed open standard APIs, such as Open Social, FriendConnect, and the Social Graph API. Google has built up its own little iron curtain with MySpace, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Ning, and the Google-owned Orkut to prop up its open source platform initiative. (Don’t bother trying to follow the Cold War analogy all the way through — it doesn’t really work.)

Facebook is now planning to follow Google’s lead and open source their platform. Previously, Facebook’s platform technology only powered an app development platform on one site outside its own — that of rival social networking site, bebo (recently acquired by AOL). An open sourced platform means that any social network could implement Facebook applications. More details should emerge in the next couple of days, according to TechCrunch, who broke the story.

Two questions immediately spring to mind following this news: 1. Does this help users? 2. Do platforms even matter?
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Reality TV star Brody Jenner is set to star in another reality TV series entitled “Bromance” on MTV.

It’s still unclear on who will be featured alongside the 24-year-old, but former best bud Spencer Pratt could jump in for a ride.

A source was quoted by E! News saying it’s “possible Spencer could appear on the show.”

Jenner’s 10-year friendship with Pratt had suddenly ended when Pratt asked him to choose between him and Lauren Conrad, who is Pratt and girlfriend Heidi Montag’s worst enemy.

The source adds, “Spencer had been calling and texting for a long time, begging to make up, but Brody was just blowing him off. Spencer was relentless.”

Jenner, along with his brother Brandon, starred in the short lived reality series “The Princes of Malibu,” which only lasted for two episodes. He currently appears in “The Hills” and he occasionally shows up in another reality series “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” where his dad Bruce and his new family are featured.