Weblogging enables flood of parodies on April Fools’ Day.
Wow, what a busy April Fools’ Day this has been! When Rick Klau and I first started doing parodies together in 1997, we didn’t have a lot of company.
But this year there were dozens of parodies, more than I anticipated, more than I could keep up with. Rick’s parody was published shortly after midnight and then the parody floodgates opened. And many originated in blogs. Next year, I may have guest bloggers helping me keep track of all of the silliness. Let me know if you are interested.
In 1999, Rick and I won an award from InternetWire for our “press release” about Visa purchasing the Internet. We chose InternetWire because both PRNewsWire and BusinessWire explicitly prohibit parody press releases in their terms and conditions.
Knowing the wire services’ policy on April Fools’ Day press releases, I tended to believe that Google’s Gmail press release was true from the moment I read it. Google was clearly the story of the day.
After April Fools’ Day 2004 officially comes to a close, I’ll take a look at the stats to see which story on my site was the most popular. I’ll post those results tomorrow along with my thoughts on what makes a good parody. Now, I’ve got to get some much-needed sleep.
