Moneydick

Wikipedia has a great collection of this year’s April Fools jokes in jolly cyber land.
My favorites are:

1. Google Romance

They “released” a fake online dating service with a very funny tutorial to get you started.

The best comedy is in the ‘help section’ though:

What is Contextual Dating?
It’s a free date plus the added accrued value of the past decade’s worth of post-Industrial Age online marketing genius, all tied into a real-time, video-based, GPS-tracked, psychographically astute and environmentally pervasive promotional system.

7. Come again?
You see ads that might make your date better.

8. Such as?
Flowers. Music. Personal advice. E-greetings. Later on, depending on how our long-term opt-out natural-language-based monitoring system thinks things are going, personalized thank you notes, romantic getaway offers, various intimate pharmaceutical come-ons, engagement and bridal wear catalogs – you know the drill.

2. NBC Public Service Ads

NBC ran some Public service announcements in the style of the “The More You Know” campaign, done by cast members of “The Office“, while in character. An example by Dwight Schrute:

“Black bears weigh between 2 and 500 pounds. Brown bears weigh between 300 and over a thousand pounds. Black bears run away from you. Brown bears run at you. When attacked by a bear, simply lie still on the ground and cover your face and head with your hands. When the bear’s finished batting you around and mauling you, contact the U.S. Forest Service.” [video here]

More of these PSAs are posted on NBC’s web site.

3. Carbon Devouring Mammal Discovered

A remarkable new animal was discovered in Viet Nam recently by Dr. Alexander McKenzie, a biologist at the Woody Hole Terragraphic Institute. The small mammal seems to be able to consume most kinds of organic matter, and somehow combines it with carbon dioxide from the air, to produce fecal pellets of limestone. Dr. McKenzie thinks that perhaps by ranching these animals in large numbers, enough CO2 could be absorbed to have a meaningful effect on global warming. Dr. McKenzie is now searching for more of the animals having inadvertantly consumed the only one he’s found so far.

On the extensive Wikipedia collection, there’s also a list of events on April 1st that were incorrectly assumed to be pranks.