Most obvious example: CNN’s decision to cede much of its airtime to a stunt involving Larry King and Ashton Kutcher, who are having some kind of follower contest, which you can read about somewhere else.

But no need to single out the Time Warner (TWX) unit–every big news outlet now features stories about Twitter, presented by anchors/reporters who use Twitter. Which makes sense, because while Twitter may not be for everyone, it definitely appeals to professional self-promoters. [UPDATE: Add Oprah Winfrey to the ranks.]

If you tried to put a price tag on that kind of coverage… well, it’d be very expensive. Just advertising a Web service on TV doesn’t ensure success–ask IAC’s (IACI) Ask.com (or Pets.com, for that matter). But it can certainly get people to sample the service. So that’s some of what’s going on here.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the press embrace Twitter in real-time, there’s now a service that will let you do just that. Meet Muck Rack, which does nothing but aggregate Tweets from media members (um, like me).

The site comes to us from Sawhorse Media, a Brooklyn company that is trying to make a business out of Twitter-related sites and stunts–they’re the dudes who brought us the Shorty Awards earlier this year, as well as Musebin, a collection of Twitter-sized music reviews.

Sawhorse CEO Greg Galant tells me this one took a week to build, which is good, because the conceit is wafer-thin.

But it’s also a pretty good one–like the late, lamented “March Tweetness” promotion, there’s definitely something to sorting and curating the flood of Tweets. I also like the fact that Muck Rack offers a “links” view  that highlights the full headline of stories that media folks inevitably promote via their Tweets. Very helpful. You could definitely extract a few ad dollars out of this one, if you were so inclined.

Or you could just use it as an excuse to write about Twitter, again.

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

And now it’s gone. At least temporarily.

Federated has taken down the site at the request of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and has put up a placeholder search page in its place. The problem? The college sports group, which keeps a tight grip on any and all trademarks related to its teams, games and tournaments, says the site infringed on its copyrights.

You’d think that might have crossed the minds of Twitter, Federated or at least the folks at AT&T (T), who already work with the NCAA. But no matter. Federated spokesguy Matthew DiPietro says the site will be back up with a new look, a lack of copyright violations and a different URL in time for the tournaments Final Four games this weekend.

Does this derail the great Twitter advertising strategy? Nope. But it does illustrate just how new and unformed this stuff is, both for Twitter and its ad partners. Which DiPietro is happy to admit. “These are first-of-their-kind executions,” he told me. “They’re very experimental… things will get worked out.”

Everything about the newest ad gambit is parallel to the earlier one: It’s run via Web ad agency/network Federated Media, and consists of a page that Twitter endorses and will promote on its site.

And just like the ExecTweet page, most Twitter users won’t see Twitter’s promotions since most Twitter usage happens away from Twitter.com. And just like ExecTweets, March Tweetness is a collection of themed Tweets that you could find on your own, using Twitter’s handy search function, which it paid $15 million for last year.

But this one looks marginally more useful to me: Unlike ExecTweets, there is a rhyme and reason to collecting Tweets tied to specific events–in this case, different games during college basketball’s March Madness tournament. One of Twitter’s most compelling features, after all, is its ability to deliver snippets of thoughts, in real time, so I could see people actually using this one.