I recently joked on April Fools Day, about Problogger Darren Rowse going bankrupt.

The reason I picked that topic is because I admire Darren Rowse immensely.

I’ve been reading and following his blog for about 2 years now. I don’t think my own blog would be nearly where it is today, without all those great blog posts that he’s written.

To me - a fan of Darren, the most unthinkable thing that could happen is for him to go Bankrupt. If THE Problogger himself went bankrupt - what would that say about the industry? If he was really ‘faking’ it all those years, and all those blog posts. It’s unthinkable and unbelievable.

That’s why I used it as a joke, apparently someone thought it would be even funnier to add it to his Wikipedia page, which I agree may have been overstepping the line just a bit.

Mostly the post was an experiment to see which joke would get more interest, one about microsoft, one about Darren, one about Shoemoney, or one about John Chow (which I accidently forgot to post anyhow..lol).

Apparently, Darren is more popular and famous than microsoft.

To Darren: I do apologize if this has caused any hurt feelings, I do have a ton of respect for the work that you do, and I’ve used your blog postings to bring my current blog to 150 subscribers in less than 30 days, and 1200 hits per day.

I first found out about this via twitter - you can read another blog post on the subject here.

The original post which can be found here, will soon be edited to remove the main content and announce that it was indeed a joke.

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Fool or Be Fooled!
Yesterday was probably the biggest April Fool’s day Prank day I’ve ever seen. If you’re trying to make money online, then you probably had your own April Fool’s day prank - if not then you missed out on a great Opportunity. Some blogs have even launched or come out of obscurity due to a prank.

To follow success, you need to follow those who are successful, and Darren Rowse who says he’s not a fan of April Fool’s day - said he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. He calls it ‘Opportunity Cost’, which is the cost of passing up an opportunity.

April Fool’s day in my opinion is a fun day, to build traffic and linkbait. But it does get old, remember April Fool’s starts a day early in Australia - which is why I launched my pranks a day early, to get the most value..

Here’s a recap on my pranks - one of which nobody caught..hehe..

Free Hardware Downloads! Get your Macbook Air today!
Shoemoney Arrested for Riding-A-Bike While Drunk!
Problogger Darren Rowse - Is Filing for Bankruptcy! What are we to do?
Google buys Microsoft for $1 Trillion Dollars. Bill Gates Craps Pants!

 

And now for the one that nobody called me on:

Wow, Twitter + Digg = 1755 New Subscribers over the Weekend!

The truth is I only have about 90 subscribers, which is still good for 2 weeks!

The one that got the most talked about, surprisingly was the one about Problogger, apparently he’s more popular than Google buying Microsoft. (By most talked about I’m going by # of comments received)

Everyone who is anyone yesterday was pulling off some kind of prank.  There were many great pranks - the best though, would have to be my wife’s.

We’ve been trying to have a baby for 2 years now, and haven’t been that successful, in fact that’s one of the main motivations for me - to become successful so that we can do some of the more expensive infertility treatments out there. She is on medicine for PCOS, a female disorder, that when she goes off the medicine she needs to take a Pregnancy test (she takes it for 10 days per month.)

So this morning I walk in the bathroom, and see a test and it’s positive. I was like what the ____?! She’s like oh..yeah I’m pregnant, and I’m like really? She’s like - No.. Gottya!.. I must say it was definitely a good one, she had me for a minute..lol.

Around the blogosphere there were tons of april fool’s day jokes.

 

Google had a great day of jokes:

Google’s Scratch and Sniff E-Books
Google talk, in order to reduce chat-based CO2 emissions, is going to be cutting back on useless characters. EG: “As far as I’m Concerned” becomes “AFAIC”.
Then there’s Google & Virgin Mobile’s plan to colonize mars called project ‘Virgle’. Read the official blog post, or watch the youtube video.
There was also talk of OpenGoogle, which apparently lets you create a seach engine of your own, that has a custom ranking algorithm, and a personalized interface. You can choose from 100 different ranking criterion, including: Page’s self importance, # of original ideas, IQ of Author / Webmaster, Number of links from Wikipedia, this was originally posted by ionut here, apparently Google’s system also gave Ionut an IQ of 125, of which he says they’re 50 off. He wouldn’t state, in which direction they’re off though.. So could be 75 or 175 - my bet is 75. 
Also on google docs if you clicked on the New tab, it gave you the option of creating a ‘New Airplane’, which would then create a document with a paper-plane layout design.
Gmail, utilizing a new eflux-capacitor technology, can now send emails to the future and the past. Their new initiative is called: “Custom Time”
According to Seach Engine Land, Microsoft - Google’s biggest competitor is going to pay people $1,000,000/year NOT to use Google. If this is the case - count me in! LOL.
Google Calendar has a new “Wake-up kit”, includes bucket of water mechanism. It uses progressively more aggressive approaches to waking a person up, starting with an SMS message, ending with a bucket of water in the face.
Virtual Tourism Blog found that Google Street View censors it’s Competitors like Yahoo.
Google’s myspace clone - Orkut, turned into ‘Yogurt’.
Google added ‘I’m feeling Lucky’ feature to google Calendar, so you can add a random event, for instance ‘Date with Anna Kournikova’, (or George Bush, Lois Griffin, etc…)
The google sight-seeing blog reports new viewing options in google earth and google maps - xray and thermal energy. Now you can see inside buildings!
Google also launched “Adsense for conversations”.
The french Abondance Blog announced that Google is the new sponsor of the Paris Saint Germain football club, they backed it up with photo evidence, as well.
ReadWriteWeb reported on Google’s new ‘Dream Ads’.
Google’s Matt Cutt’s apparently skipped April Fool’s this year, and instead got a Firefox tattoo(Suspicious?)
Also on google earth, it was reported that if you zoom out far enough, you can view all the continents as one, as it might have looked a million years ago.
The sun discovered an UFO on Google Earth.

Some other notable Pranks:

Youtube rickrolled everyone big-time, and so did JohnChow. This apparently pissed off a lot of his subscribers / patrons. Chris Jacobson from Money Making Scoop states that he lost some work he was working on because of the javascript popups. John Chow even reported a lot of comments to the effect of people un-subscribing, because of the RickRoll.
Daniel at Daily Blog Tips, announced they were acquired for $168,000 - that was NOT true, he also announced on Daily Writing tips, that English was becoming the official language of the Internet.
Problogger Darren Rowse’s launch of “Pay Per Tweet” was obviously a gimmick - admittedly I fell for it, and sent an email to the email address he had for it.
You can also check out Tech Crunch’s lawsuit for $25 Million against Facebook.
Then there’s John Chow Cola - the Official Soda of Bloggers everywhere.
WinningTheWeb added a hummer h3 to their huge contest.
Garry Conn got banned from Adsense and lost like $13,000. I knew this was a prank because he didn’t seem as upset as he should’ve been.
Bloggingfingers, obviously copying my prank, hehe.. Broke into the 23k subscribers realm.
Digg to buy Microsoft as shares fall..
Darn Good Reviews announced soap made from frogs that washes away fat.
Chris Pirillo apparently got in fight with wife and quit job.
Shoemoney wrote a good post on how to make $100000 in an hour.
Discounted Airfare - if you’re willing to stand.
Tech2 spoke of India banning foreign Social Networks.
Mahalo’s interview with Steve Jobs.
New Music Mask, turns your face into a musical Instrument.
TimeTraVLr Builds your website yesterday, using Web3.0 Technology and 50% more Ajax!
Thinkgeek is selling a Betamax to HD-DVD convertor.
IRS considers giving bloggers  tax exempt status.
Njection is offering real-time tracking of police officers, and tells you what crime they’re responding to.
E-harmony founder finds true love…At Match.com!
Ades’ Blog is going RSS - ONLY!
Joel Comm finds way to totally get rid of Spam.
Trust Banners - Enforces Guaranteed Brand Loyalty.
Thinkgeek also has a new USB Pregnancy Test.
You can also check out Gearlog’s Poop-brown Ipod, in support of those with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
You can also read about Apple’s launch of I-phone Enterprise Infrastructure Server (IpEnIS for short).
Also Nintendo WII launches a new virtual peeing game called the super PII PII Brothers. I can see lawsuits saying the game is sexist, after-all males would seem to have an advantage…

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