April Fools Day 2008 Wrapup

Well, if you’re a blogger, there’s no way you missed April Fools Day this year. Just about every blog had some sort of trick!

However, it’s about quality, not quantity, so here are my thoughts:

My most anticipated prank was from Shoemoney, and his Make $1000 An Hour video turned out to be pretty cool. It was pretty obvious, but still funny… and the joke kept going through the comments, so it was a good time. (Some people were fooled though!)

John Chow partnered with Coca-Cola, which was OK. The Photoshopping was great, but it was a little too obvious to fool anyone.

And the Rick Rolling stuff was pretty boring. The one from Cow was plain obnoxious.

Zac Johnson started his own blog affiliate program, which wasn’t the funniest out there, but it was believable. 75 cents per click would have been a nice payout

Darren Rowse launched PayPerTweet, which was quite amusing, although I’m willing to bet that there is already a lot of “pay per tweeting” going on. Funny and believable, it was a good one.

It must have worked, too, because it seems more and more bloggers are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. A coincidence, or are they looking to cash in?

You could even sue Facebook. Granted there are lots of lawsuit jokes, but that post on TechCrunch was so funny anyway!

Jim Kukral was in there too. His joke was the post “Stop Asking Me to Digg Sh*t”… since that was posted on April 1st, it’s obvious that he actually wants you to send him tons of emails every day asking him to Digg your stuff.

My personal favorite prank was from Tim Ferriss, a master of outsourcing, who revealed that he even outsourced his personal blog! I was torn between “wow, he is a freakin genius, I want to do that, too” to “man, this would be a crazy good April Fools joke!”

Turns out it was a prank, and it was extremely fun and realistic. Kudos to him!

The big letdowns were people that pretended to sell their blog, which is way too common, and it’s been done so much before. There are so many things you could do, why bother with lame, old jokes like that?

It would be much better to joke about SEO firms or make tons of cash. (My jokes were obviously the best of the bunch, but they didn’t get much coverage because I don’t have thousands of noobs lurking around here looking for generic advice…)

Another great one was in the form of Blog Commentator. I was in on the joke, but apparently very few people were.

You know how I love spoofs, right? Well Blog Commentator was a spoof on all the “buy blog comments” style of comment spamming services. It even had contextual analysis technology like Google Adsense so it could analyze the blog post and leave a thoughtful comment that would in no way be recognized as spam!

Please take a look, it must have taken tons of work to do the full sales letter, ordering process, and wait list! I thought it was hilarious, but no one else joined in. I can only think of three reasons for that: 1) People are too dumb to appreciate a good April Fool’s Joke, 2) People are too lazy to look at it, or 3) Blog comment spamming is so common that bloggers are no longer passionate about it.

I didn’t mean to rant so long, but a lot of top bloggers give out press coverage to real comment spammers, but they ignore a great spoof about it? WTF?

Anyway, Happy April Fool’s Day!

Did I miss any good ones?

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