As far as I know, April Fool’s didn’t get me yesterday, but that might or might not come as an unpleasant surprise later on, who knows. It did get 901am though, with Mike Arrington cheating by publishing his joke one day early. Not nice, not cool, not in the spirit of things if you ask me. Then again, it’s no biggie either so who cares. Apparently we also fell for the demo tape thing. How’s your back Duncan? ;)

Bloggers Blog have got a nice list of April Fool’s jokes this year, but as usual Wikipedia is the king of the hill so if you want to ruin a full work day by surfing nonsense that’s where you’ll want to go.

Now back to our regular program.

Originally posted on April 2, 2007 @ 12:40 am

Yahoo has won regulatory approval to acquire Taiwanese based social networking site Wretch.cc for $21.2m.

The relatively unknown Wretch, which we covered back in February, is a Xanga style blogging and social networking destination extremely popular in Chinese language markets, with an Alexa ranking in 36, making the Yahoo acquisition a complete and utter bargain.

According to reports, the purchase had been held up by the Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission, who investigated complaints that the acquisition would give Yahoo Taiwan unfair control over Internet advertising rates in Taiwan, and excessive market share as well.

Wretch is said to have 2.8 million members.

Tags: Wretch

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 7:34 pm

Australian Blog The Spin Starts Here, an institution in the Australian blogging world, has announced April 1 that it’s closing down.

In a post to TSSH readers, site owner Caz detailed that she had lost much of the passion she once had in running the site, and that the site has become to difficult to maintain.

Admittedly, given the posting date of April 1 I automatically presumed that it was an April Fools Day joke, however I’ve since received an email from Caz confirming that the site is shutting, and that the date was to “mess with peoples heads”.

The site has previously been described by leading Australian Media outlets previously as being “Repugnant and disturbing”, “Extraordinarily vicious” and “Foul mouthed [and] mildly offensive” (Daily Telegraph, The West & The Age in order), and is one of Australia’s longest running blogs, having been launched in 2002.

Its also been one of my favorite reads for many years, and it will be sorely missed, although admittedly given some of the flame wars I’ve been involved in there recently, it’s probably a positive for my health.

Caz writes that the domain will be handed over to regular contributor TeaLou, who plans to turn the site into a forum.

Originally posted on April 1, 2007 @ 1:00 am

Over the past few years, the once ubiquitous TV Guide magazine seems to have disappeared from many magazine outlets, at least here in Canada. In a similar vein, numerous newspapers have turned their weekly TV listings into a useless matrix with nothing more than episode number and time. No more commentary on an episode or movie. And not all that easy to find regional TV listings online, depending on where you live.

But with time-shifting TV and cool software like Orb’s myTV and Rok TV for mobile viewing, do you really need a TV guide? An episodal search engine may be more useful (provided you know what you’re looking for). And that’s what the once ubiquitous (in print) TV Guide wants to be: the go-to resource for video search. They’re planning a launch for mid-April, and with their beta search engine, you’ll be able to find links to full episodes. That is, they won’t be hosting the content – at least not initially.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 9:04 am

Egyptian blogs are exposing voter fraud, with video taken via mobile phones showing ballot stuffing at the recent referendum giving the State more powers to crack down on Islamic dissent.

According to The Peninsula,

A handful of video clips, most of which appear to be taken by mobile phone cameras and circulated on Egyptian blogs and websites, contain some of the first images of alleged fraud in the vote and could reinforce the accusations of vote fixing…In one of three clips viewed by Reuters, a man purported to be an election official in the Nile Delta appears to mark names on a voter list, then folds a pile of ballots and stuffs them into a transparent vote box. A close-up of one of the ballots shows it is marked with a “Yes” vote.

Originally posted on March 30, 2007 @ 2:24 am