April Fool Roundup

The financial advice site Motley Fool is anything but stuffy and formal, as the photo shows. On April 1st it always posts some financial foolishness (drawing extra traffic from curious visitors like me). This year is no exception. The site has "accepted financial recovery funding from the United States government to the tune of $25 million." My first thought: Why not $25 billion? Who bothers with millions these days?

Of course The Onion can't resist some silly April Fool's stories, such as "Obama Depressed, Distant Since Battlestar Galactica Series Finale." But anyone who lands on that site knows what to expect in any case.

Then there's Google, which offers more subtle foolishness in announcing "CADIE Awakens." CADIE stands for Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. Sounds fishy to me. Check the blog links below this announcement for more fun, such as Amazon's new web service, the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE).

In London, The Guardian announced it's going all-Twitter, no print. "Any story can be told in 140 characters." Right.

Expedia is offering travelers the chance to save over $3 trillion on flights to Mars. Hotels.com is renting hotel rooms on the Moon from 800 pounds per night.

Seriously, can April Fool's jokes really help your brand? Fast Company says yes--here's why.

Finally, a bit of older news that sounds like April Fool stuff but isn't--who could make this stuff up? NASA held a contest to name its new room on the International Space Station and "the Colbert" (as in Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report) was the top vote-getter. Have a fun day.