Fool of Fun

I’m back and a-blogging. Which considering how much work I have ahead of me is a brilliant April Fool’s joke. Ha.

As April Fool’s gags go, this one was good because with the Christian Science Monitor and Blender folding up their print versions, I think most people had that one-second heart attack when they read the headline. (Unlike CSM which is going to be an online venture now, Blender is well and truly dead. R.I.P..) Rio Palof, which is smartly almost an anagram for April Fool and therefore almost a believable byline, reported:

“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

Even WordPress got a shout-out.

A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Here’s how Martin Luther King survives in the Guardian’s Twitterised archive:

Martin Luther King’s legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian’s Twitterised archive as “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by”, eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

Not just that, there’s breaking news too:

… Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.