Okay so I am tentatively going to say that I aim to be posting a bit more. No promises as I am still very busy, but on with it!
So yesterday was April 1st and as usual we saw numerous gags take the blogosphere, some funny, some were so quick you would have missed them. I posted about one on The Global Geek Blog that I found quite humorous. That said I did not go out and hunt them all down. Fortunately a few kind souls have done that for us.
First up The Bloggers Blog has done a nice round up of most of the online pranks that were staged. There were some great ones, I particularly liked the WiiHelm from Think Geek. They always come up with a ripper. I saw one joke from them (I have no idea if it was an April Fool) that detailed a product that was a “wireless extension cord”, very funny. The Geeks there even went to the effort to rig up a demo version and a video for the WiiHelm which had the right amount of stupidity about it.
Wikipedia have compiled a more definitive list of jokes and pranks. This list also includes print, television and audio media. Might also be worth checking the legit stories that were not April Fools gags but were mistaken as such. Always good to know. I just about gave up reading the RSS feeds yesterday as I was begining to think that everything was a joke. Must have been a bad day for news.
Other April Fools 2007 Lists and Resources:
Urgo’s 2007 List of April Fool’s Day Jokes on Websites: Add one if you can not find it
2007 April Fools Jokes by goodstuff: Do the April Fools Jokes Web2.0 style with this tour on Trailfire. It would have been nice if this was a bit more exhaustive, but that would be a huge job to put together. Nice way to see them though, including descriptions.
Have fun and get thinking for next year, maybe your prank will top the lot, might make you famous even.
Rooster's Rail 
Comment Armageddon
January 10, 2007 — The RoosterSo there I was catching up on some RSS feeds that I had missed over the Christmas New Year break. I made an unexpected find while I was doing that. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is a respected authority in Web 2.0 circles as far as covering new start-ups and the culture of the Internet and technology news. But this post caused some controversy.
TechCrunch covered a website that was a social network for budding photographers. So what you might say. Well this is a social network for amateur pornography. I have not linked to the site covered because that is not what this post is about. Arrington covers the site in a very matter-of-fact way that you would expect. It would seem that his readers don’t appreciate it, generally. True this is not the sort of thing that TechCrunch usually covers and that might be why there was the reaction that there was. Still not sure it was worthy of the reaction of some.
The real action here is the comments. There are no less than 191 comments at the time of this post. It is the most entertaining run of comments that I have read in a long time. Like fies to a dead cow everyone turns up for a go. It has everything from name calling to preaching doom and gloom. There are “hissy” fits and passionate pleas. Everything, you name it you will find it here.
What’s more the names read like a who’s who of the blogosphere. Featuring in order of appearance:
I am sure there are some I missed or did not recognise. These guys probably subscribe to TechCrunch so I am not surprised that they do. But for them to be motivated enough to comment, you can imagine. I learned some things about Robert Scoble that I did not know. He actually kicks butt in an argument. Still not sure why they got involved, no one wins a flame war.
Very entertaining and well worth the read. Not often I recommend to skip the article and go straight to the comments. I am not about to make judgements about the merits of Arringtons choice of topics but suffice to say his readers have spoken. But from my perspective it doesn’t seem like it fits the TechCrunch mould. It says a lot about knowing your audience.