Normally when you start seeing double, you know it’s time to lay off the drinks. Stoli Vodka new ad campaign, which features people drinking alcohol and talking to themselves, thinks otherwise. And so does Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who, like Hugh Hefner and Julia Stiles before him, interviews himself over some Stoli. The thirty-second video shows Stone geting slightly confrontational with himself, asking, “Did it ever occur to you that maybe Twitter is a constant stream of meaningless babble?”

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies. The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. See the full list after the jump:

Twitter has started rolling out a new feature they’re referring to as Project Retweet, inspired directly by users of the site. Co-founder Biz Stone made the announcement Friday evening, showing a truly savvy understanding of online growth and collaboration.

In the age of the Verified Account, we expect our celebrities and media personalities to be on Twitter. It’s both the quickest and easiest way for them to reach their audiences and it provides a small window into the minutiae of their everyday lives. So we’ve tallied and ranked the top 25 media figures by number of Twitter followers and the results, if not surprising, are telling.

Martha Stewart opened up her studio audience seats to live-bloggers yesterday in an impressive release of control for the notoriously cautious television talk show circuit. Where audience members are normally forced off the grid during tapings, Martha’s show staff asked us all to bring and use our laptops, smartphones and cameras. As Martha herself posted on Twitter, Facebook and her blog, the show was to be “all about social networking.” The result? Somewhat disappointing and not very social, but a smart move nonetheless.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced plans to introduce commercial accounts aimed at business users who will pay for premium services like detailed analytics. The company might follow that by building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a “commercial layer” over the social network. The commercial APIs would be out “later this year,” he said.

Journalists, if you are going to spout off about Twitter, I beg you: Do some research. This has occurred to me frequently since Twitter hit the big time earlier this year, mostly because there have been frequent glaring errors on the part of “mainstream” journalists who write precious little articles about the microblogging service. On [...]