ManCrunch has probably gotten everything they wanted from having the Banned Super Bowl Ad of the Year this year: tons of free publicity without having to pay the big ticket price of actually having the ad on the air. Of course, it wouldn’t be Super Bowl ad season without a banned GoDaddy ad, too. Metro Weekly embeds both ads here, along with some analysis from the GLBT side of the debate about how CBS erred in banning the spots. Andrew Sullivan comments here and AdAge reports here that ManCrunch says the ad isn’t a stunt. Alrighty, then.

Time suck alert: There are worse ways of relieving your frustration over the frigid weather than blasting zombie snowmen into oblivion. (Hint: Go for the head shot, it means extra points.)

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
—Johnny Cash

Okay, that’s a little harsh. Google News doesn’t suck. But it could be made a lot better with one simple tweak: filter out the press releases.

I’ve written countless press releases over the years. I understand that a good press release is about announcing something newsworthy. But the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of press releases don’t fall into the category of news.

So when I find myself searching Google News for late-breaking developments on a specific topic and seven or eight of the top 10 results are fluffy press releases about that topic, that renders Google News pretty useless.

Hey Google: Why not create a “Press Releases” sub-category and filter all the press releases there? It can’t be that tough: A huge percentage of your news results are coming from sites like PRNewswire and PRWeb and are tagged “press release.”

It’s time for Google to make the news more newsworthy.

After three months, Newsday has 35 paid subscribers to its newspaper site.

That’s not a typo: 35.

The New York Observer reports. Huffington Post readers comment. Meanwhile, the New York Times, which already failed with a paid content program back in 2005-07 and is planning another major pay-to-read initiative, has to be sweating this revelation big-time.

Wow: 35. Amazing.