Hate me if you must, but I am not a football fan at all. It just holds no interest for me. I used to have a need to sit through every Super Bowl though. Why? I loved watching all the multi-million dollar advertisements.

Now however, thanks to Al Gore and whoever invented TiVo, I don’t have to put up with all the shirtless obese men painted in their team’s colors, or the nonstop grunting from amplified helmet mics anymore. Using my DVR I can just fast forward between commercials afterward, or even better, find the websites that let me select exactly which ones I want to watch and when. If you feel the same way about the sport, or even if you are a pigskin fan who just may have missed an ad or two during some congratulatory chest-bumping, these are the best three sites I came across this year:

Spike.com/superbowl

Hulu.com/adzone

CBSSports.com

Enjoy! Oh, and before you head off to voluntarily watch the advertisements from the big game that CBS will be using to pay its bills (each 30 sec. spot was 2.5 mil a pop!), we humbly request you consider clicking on an ad or two here every so often. It’s a small something we’d be very appreciative of and would help us continue to feed the habits of Info Addicts everywhere.

Season 3 of Mad Men is nearly upon us (August 16) and, surprisingly, so are a bunch of merchandising deals. I don’t know about you, but Mad Men, one of the greatest shows in the history of television (there, I said it), is not an obvious merchandising juggernaut, but that isn’t stopping a bunch of companies from making an attempt to latch onto the popular AMC series.

Banana Republic will be running an in-store campaign across 400 locations that will use images from Mad Men. Better yet, they will be running a contest that offers a walk-on role for a future Mad Men episode, plus a $1,000 Banana Republic gift card.

From Ad Age:

The fashion-marketing tie-ins also extend to “Mad Men’s” second-season DVD, out Tuesday, featuring a special feature titled “An Era of Style” and Don Draper’s signature crisp white dress shirt on the cover. Clorox bleach created a customized ad for the DVD, in partnership with Lionsgate Home Entertainment, featuring a lipstick mark on said collar, with the tagline “Getting ad guys out of hot water for generations.”

Additionally, the “Era of Style” featurette will be the subject of a Vanity Fair custom spread and sweepstakes, with an accompanying ad in Macy’s stores nationwide. Variety.com will also feature “Mad Men” ads as part of its recently digitized archives to give readers a digital flipbook and articles from the early 1960s.

Anne Parducci, exec VP-marketing at Lionsgate Home Entertainment, said the “Mad Men” first-season DVD was a top-10 seller for the TV category last year, and expects even bigger sales for the second entry. “The awards the show has received really put it on the radar and made AMC readily available as a channel,” she said.

Amazon has filed several patents that reveal possible realities coming soon to Kindle, their popular (and expensive) e-book reader.

The abstract says:

Access to an electronic version of a physical work is provided to a user. The electronic version of the physical work comprises images of the physical work that, when visually displayed, appear the same as the physical work. Access to the electronic version of the physical work is based on user ownership of the physical work. Access to a portion or all of the physical work may be provided in accordance with one or more access rules. A user may own a physical work by virtue of purchasing the physical work or purchasing an item that the physical work normally accompanies. A flag may be set for later reference to indicate user ownership of the physical work.

In simple terms, if you purchase a physical book from Amazon, then you’d also get a free electronic version of the same book for your Kindle, albeit littered with ads to either significantly reduce the cost or make it free altogether.

It’s not a bad idea, though I would rather see e-books offered for free without the need of purchasing an actual, physical copy. Ad-supported books may seem like the beginning of the end for human culture, but if Amazon can work it so more people are reading without going bankrupt, then that is something I can get behind.

More details at CNet.

So you started a Twitter account and now find yourself with zero followers. You’re not alone. Fortunately, if you have money, you can now have plenty of followers. A company based in Australia by the name of uSocial is selling blocks of followers, starting at $87 for 1,000 virtual admirers.

From BBC:

Leon Hill, chief executive of uSocial, said the company finds potential followers by searching Twitter and working out what individual users are interested in. It also profiles where people are so it can more closely match users with those they might want to follow.

USocial then sends messages to potential followers telling them about the new Twitter user they might want to follow.

“It’s up to the user to follow them or not,” said Mr Hill. He added that uSocial continues to look for followers until the specified number had signed up.

USocial has about 150 customers that had bought followers and had another 80-90 campaigns about to roll out.