Ioannus de Verani

Hello, I need you to go to my new blog and take this one out of your feed reader, and add my new one.

My new blog is at http://blog.verani.net. Please do this; I don’t want my new blog to die, because all my old visitors are stuck in the old one…

Regards,
Ioannus de Verani
http://blog.verani.net

UPDATE: Haochi has since expressed his apologies [see comments]

Haochi Chen of Googlified (no link!) must have a sick mind, to play such mean-spirited jokes upon the minds of extremely gullible people such as myself. You too, Philipp Lensson!

Was this funny to anyone?

Well, this extremely well crafted hoax did one good thing for me: the posts I wrote about it, thinking it was real, made record hit-rates for my blog (369 in 24 hours is a lot for a small blog like mine).

Maybe I will cool off later; if I do, I will add Googlified back into my feeds .

…and not a single person fell for my trick. I guess by the time I had done it, it was a little old…

Alas, maybe next year, I'll come up with a trick by the 28th of March, and maybe I won't get fooled by any of you meanies (Philipp Lensson, Haochi Chen, I am talking to you…).

Well, so long, and good night.

UPDATE: or not.

I will probably get flamed for falling for an April Fool’s Day joke, but I really believe that this one could be real.

Let’s suppose for one minute that the Google Drive is real thing and that they are now letting the cat out of the bag. Who do we know that is associated with Google Drive? Two people:

• Niniane Wang and
• Mark Ayzenshtat

Niniane Wang is supposedly the leader of the Google Drive team. Mark Ayzenshtat is supposedly the product manager (this information is taken from the post that was taken down from the Official Google Blog and the post that is still there on the Official Google Drive Blog).

In order to prove the occupations of these two people, what better place to look than their personal homepages? Check it out:

Both their pages say that they are working on a confidential project.

Moreover, they both have a history of working on some pretty high-profile google products; Ms. Wang worked on Gmail and Google Desktop, and Mr. Ayzenshtat worked on Adwords. If we read further, not only were they both working on big projects, but they both were in advertising-related projects (Wang lead the team for Gmail advertisement). Is it possible that the two are now working upon monetizing Google Drive?

Or… maybe it is just an April Fool’s Day joke.

Tags: google, drive, april+fools+day

Strange. I just tried to go onto Robert Scoble's blog, http://www.scobleizer.com/, but instead, I got this:

Strange, huh?

I wonder if something is wrong with wordpress? 

Being the poor gullible soul that I am, I got taken into every single April Fool’s joke that was played, except for the Google Teaspoon Wifi. That means that Scoble tricked me with his iReader, Google with Gmail Paper Archive, TechCrunch with the purchase of F***edCompany, etc. Now, I feel really stupid.

Next year, I hope that I will not be as gullible as this year, and perhaps I will come out with my own AFJ, but until then, I will just be drooling over the thought of a shiny, white, non-glare, easy-in-the-sun, expensive, apple-branded e-book reader………

Hello, dear readers! I have passed 10,000 blog hits today (or yesterday)! Thank you so much for reading my blog, and please continue to do so.

I will continue to do my best to pump out interesting posts. Good night!

Wow, everyone! I just got on Robert Scoble’s linkblog! Here is the original post: http://ioannusdeverani.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/microsoft-not-really-so-transparent-after-all/

Thanks, Robert!

Forget 'Naked Conversations', this is 'Conversationswhilewearingexcessiveundergarmentssweatsasuitandaparkaallatonce'.

I am, of course, referring to the little slip Microsoft made when they accidentally sent Wired reportor Fred Vogelstein his entire dossier, including tactics for interviews, and predictions of questions…. I guess that they are being extra transparent, because they showed it to him…. OK, I've had my laugh.

According to Vogelstein, while he was working on a story about Microsoft's new philosophy of transparency, he was accidentally sent a dossier about him, full of a lot of sneaky information; not very transparent… I just read it, and it is pretty scary how the interviews are so carefully orchestrated. I would never want to interview someone at Microsoft, because I know that everything they tell me would be complete crap (sorry, Scoble).

If you want to read the dossier, here it is, in PDF: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/msftmemo.pdf

It is annotated by Wired, and the names and addresses of those concerned in the memo have been blanked out (replaced by Xs).