And this is my final addition to who’s fooling who on the April 1 internet — the King of Content, Copyblogger, announcing, Why Copyblogger Is Killing Its Blog.
This one really had me worried when it hit my inbox as:
a) I have a bad/good Copyblogger habit, and
b) Copyblogger closed comments on its blog not long ago — this is the trend since comment shifted to social media, but it does make the death of the blog possibility more plausible.
However, after hitting the link and seeing the picture above with the heading ‘Written Words? Who needs written words?’ I breathed a sigh of relief. That looks like a very sharp knife though, I hope no fingernails were harmed in the process.
At the end of the post, Copyblogger VP Pamela Wilson admits to the Fool, saying, ‘Not only are we not killing the Copyblogger blog, we’re going to be making improvements to it later this year. Our plans are to:
- Make it easier to find what you’re looking for
- Give you a smoother, cleaner reading experience
- Continue to provide a mix of topical articles to help you become a better writer, content creator, and businessperson.’
Unless, of course, that’s the real hoax.
[clear-line]
And on to the very final addition to the April Fools’ list — and this is not a foolish idea, but one which, I predict, some enterprising soul will take up and fund on Kickstarter.
UK bookshop Foyles even went to the lengths of posting a video on YouTube of its great new product, the boo!mark, an electronic bookmark which wakes you up (by yelling boo!) when you fall asleep reading.
For anyone who’s woken up in the morning with Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition) making a large dent in their face this would be a useful buy. I’ll be first in line for the crowdfunder.
[clear-line]
And this really is the last one. It was a bit late in the day (3.15pm) for WordPress.com to get in on the April Fools’ action but it had some good detail and, interestingly, was another jape that played on the fears of writers being replaced by software — ‘Writers’ block? No problem! Introducing AutoMatton’.
The clue here is that the founder of WordPress is one Matt Mullenweg, hence ‘Automatton’. It promises, ‘AutoMatton analyzes all of the posts that you’ve published, Facebook statuses you’ve liked, Google reviews you’ve left, and emails you’ve sent your mother to produce prose that could have been written by you. Written by future you, that is. Amazing!’
I’ve definitely read blogs that could well have been written by that sort of software already.
That’s it, April 1 is definitely officially over for me for another year.