April Fools’ Day on the Web: Topeka, Paleoparticles, and UNIXkcd

Here we were, all revved up to round up the inevitable crush of April Fools’ Day jokes across the Internet, but then … last night, we got distracted by our newly-founded admin powers on Reddit, ninjabanning likely spammers with extreme prejudice. By the time we woke up:

• Google had changed its name to Topeka,
• CERN had discovered its first-ever paleoparticle,
• Urlesque had rebranded itself as Urkelesque,
• xkcd had gone UNIX,
• and YouTube had rolled out its revolutionary new textp format.

Too much breaking geek news to keep track of!

Fortunately, TechCrunch’s Evelyn Rusli has been on the case, managing the site’s April Fools’ Day 2010 scorecard.

While we suspect there may be some conflict of interest involved in TechCrunch’s two listed April Fools’ jokes getting one of only two A+’s and the only A++, respectively, it’s a very thorough rundown and well worth the read.

Now if we could only get Google Translate for Animals to work…

(TechCrunch)