Some April Fool's Day internet news, for posterity...
- MetaFilter's Matt Haughey pretended it had been bought by Google, and thoroughly restyled it for the day. Haughey was also revelaed as a co-conspirator in the spoof Send Back Liberty site.
- The serious and respectable CPAN changed its front page into the oft-maligned Matt's Script Archive.
- The Mozilla spin-off, Phoenix, announced a long-awaited name change - the slightly inappropriate Phallus was born.
- RFC 3514 was released, detailing the addition of an "evil bit" to the internet's IPv4 headers. Systems developers were advised to take note - particularly at SlashDot, where CmdrTaco posted the news multiple times in his own inimitable style, just to be sure. Further geek "news" included:
Something Awful seemed to have turned into a Hot Boring Fetish site for the day.
Astronomy Picture Of The Day featured the appearance of a real-life owl on the lens of the Tololo All Sky Camera (TASCA), "a situation that would be even funnier if the bird's talons hadn't scratched the plastic enclosing dome".
MiniDisc.org big farewell to the format with a whole-hearted embrace for Hard-Drive Portable Audio.
Aaron Swartz gave up on the Google Blog, and began the Overture blog instead, citing the fact that, "The techno-elite have Overture.com as their start page, and often use the verb "to overture" in their sentences. There really is no place for Google in this world".
Tori Amos's website announced that she was to play Mary Poppins in a remake of the hit musical, which they described as "Overstuffed with gaiety". (Baz Luhrman was to pen the script, Luc Besson to direct).
Destiny Land revealed that Christina Ricci was to play Buttercup in an upcoming live-action version of The Powerpuff Girls.
And there were doubtless more... that I didn't get, no doubt.
Unfortunately, Amazon didn't try and sell and dirt cheap PDAs again (even for a joke), and Glastonbury Festival really did sell 112,000 tickets in around 24 hours. Thankfully, Everything2 seemed pretty much normal, except that Brian Eno popped up a bit more than usual (hi nate!) and it looks alarmingly like thefez upped and left.