When Blogs Are Beyond a Joke

As any fule kno, today is April Fool's Day. It has long been a tradition among publications - even, or perhaps especially, the most strait-laced - to show that they are not really so cold, callous and contemptible as most people think, by trying to sneak some wry little joke past their readers. Ideally, this will achieve the tricky combination of being both outrageous and just about plausible.

This was fine when news stories came sequentially and slowly: it was quite good fun sifting through a publication trying to work out which item was the fake story. But in the modern, blog-drenched world that we inhabit these days, the net effect of April Fool's Day combined with headline aggregators is to find yourself confronted by reams of utter, wilful nonsense, lacking any redeeming counterweight of real posts.

As many people have suspected when it comes to blogs, you really can have too much of a good thing.

Update: Maybe the solution is this cure for information overload.