april fools and technology
What is it about April Fools Day and the tech world? The world of tech news has adopted April 1 as its unofficial holiday. A day to write (sometimes) creative and absurd technology news stories. I will not go into specifics here, you can find many roundups of the day’s stories with a simple search. I personally am not a fan of this. I consume a lot of sites’ content in the course of a day through browsing, RSS, podcasts, etc… I found that at least 50% of the items in my RSS feed yesterday were bogus stories.
You are probably thinking I’m just pissed because I fell for a few fake stories. This really isn’t the case (this year). Even if I did, this isn’t my gripe. I find it a waste of time. I get that writing a story about Amazon’s next generation of cloud computing will actually be a server farm circulating the world in a blimp is geeky and humorous. But to have been drawn to a story on the amazon blog called “Up, Up, and Away – Cloud Computing Reaches for the Sky“, to find out its about servers in blimps is annoying. Yes this is the point of April fools, but again to have wasted 50% of my content reading time on fake entries is just ridiculous. Personally, I didn’t even find it very funny or creative.
And its not just April 1st anymore. Since the tech world has caught on, and almost everything is fake on 4/1, writers and tech geeks are starting earlier and earlier. Last year there were stories circulating a few days early, this year, April Fools came almost 2 weeks early on twitter. Again, I don’t see the point.
I get it, we are a creative bunch in the tech field. Technology is so foreign to many, these stories that seem ridiculous to some are going to be believable to others. I know plenty of people who would think cloud computing refers to servers in blimps, or some other lofty location. Having a creative outlet and practical jokes is again, not my issue. Its more about consistently wasting time reading and getting halfway through a story before it falls flat and turns out to be a joke. So I have come to this conclusion. I have decided that I will take a break from the tech world on April Fools Day. From now on, I plan to simply mark all my RSS feeds as read, and just skip all content on 4/1. It’s only one day, and I could use the vacation from technology anyway. Maybe I’ll work on some office pranks instead.
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