April Fools
These days, April Fools is a joke. Actually it’s always been a “joke” but you really have to look hard to find something that’s more creative then “your shoelace is undone”.
Once again, Slashdot takes the cake as lamest April Fools attempt. Every year on April 1st, Slashdot posts a multitude of silly story headlines which are obviously fake; especially after you’ve seen the other 400 stupid headlines they’ve posted. A typical headline is something like “U.N. Decides to Shut Down Internet Permanently” which then links to some other site which has made the story up. Bah. What’s so funny or creative about this? There are already several websites, such as The Onion, that do this every day and they do it so much funnier.
What today really should be about is catching people off guard, and doing it in a creative, yet non-malicious way. The two best examples of creativeness this year (at least in Calgary) came from radio stations. The first example was CJSW, the University of Calgary’s campus radio station pretended to be a hard rock station called ”The Cobra” and tricked hundreds of people. The second joke was courtesy of Standard Broadcasting, who apparently switched the feeds for C-JAY and The Vibe so that listeners tuned to 92.1 expecting to hear C-JAY instead heard the Vibe, and vice-versa.
Sat, 02 Apr 2005 00:35 Posted in General
