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It is this day of the year again, when even the big and popular crack on some jokes. April fool’s day is the day when the internet is not trustable anymore. Keep repeating yourself that and dive into our list. And don’t follow the panda.

Flickr is certainly going to entertain you today with some picture of the “real” world, like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaggers/3403964346

Experience a new generation of browser with the upcoming features on Opera:

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10208949-12.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheDownloadBlog

It is also a day to make good deals, like Warner Bros and their new partner:

http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-acquires-the-pirate-bay-090401/

Google employees have always been very productive on April Fool’s day:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html

http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/cadie/

Microsoft is also about to release IE8.1 as revealed by smashing mag:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/31/breaking-internet-explorer-81-eagle-eyes-leaked/

Youtube goes upside down:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xadS1NpPsPM&flip=1

What about a little try to Mars, cheapest ever!

http://www.expedia.co.uk/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/?mcicid=mars_home_uk&rfrr=-57400

That should keep you busy for a few minutes. And if you are wondering why are they bothering about doing this I would say just two words: Link Bait.

Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development

I am going to enter rant mode today and talk about a style of site design that I see almost daily. If you have a product or service to sell you will want to maximize the impact of your site. If your site looks poor and is almost unusable then people are very likely to simply drop off and go elsewhere. So why do I see apparently rich successful businessmen and Internet marketing experts making sites that look like they were created in 1993?

I thought I would break down the sort of things that these sites do and give some suggestions on how to go about solving each one.
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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development

If you spend a lot of time on the Internet you will almost certainly have come across one of the memes that appeared this year.  So as a round up of the years events I thought that I would do a list of the best memes of 2008.

But first, what is a meme?  The term was created by biologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe a unit of cultural information that acts like a gene.  A good meme will start off as an idea, which people will send to their friends.  This is then copied and changed into other themes, sometimes quite different form the starting point. It can remember the “all your base are belong to us” thing from a while back then you get the idea.

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Philip Norton
Lead Developer, Research and Development