Slideshare – April Fools Day Prank

It all started this morning… We have the SemKraft corporate presentation on Slideshare which talks about SEO, PPC, Web Analytics and SMO and we put this in a few weeks back. I was quite happy when it got a few views and a couple of people favourited it too!

But frankly speaking if you want to be noticed on Slideshare or Youtube or any of the other agents of universal search and social media optimization you have to be a nifty virus snaking through people’s conciousness as well as their keyboards.

In fact when we saw today that the views had shot up 100 times the number it had a few days back we didn’t quite buy it… we were surprised yes! and did some quick research,  needn’t have actually..after all it was April 1st..duh!

It was a prank played out to the complete misery of slathering network executives, as evident from some of the rather pissed responses at their blog, but to the delight to most of us who find this insane race for eyeballs rather droll sometimes..

The prank? Quite simple actually, they inserted couple of zeros into the number of views for your presentation and suddenly everybody was happy or fooled!..while the guys at Slideshare must be saying gotcha! i can visualise some quiet hair pulling happening around the world.

Did anybody see anything else remotely close?

Oh! Yes! Google has always loved their jokes too haven’t they and CADIE with sentient capabilities can answer your email and more, see CADIES blog, it is quite hilarious…”Today Dr. Norvig asked me again: “What is CADIE?” CADIE, I answered yet again, “is the entity.”

and Reddigg! from the  guys at Reddit…very nice!!!