Falling for April Fools' Day?

The VAR Guy is reading all press releases and news coverage extra carefully today. Quite a few of them contain April Fools’ Day pranks. Some of them are quite witty, but in the Web 2.0 world, it’s dangerous to send false or misleading messages out to your readers. Here’s why.

All it takes is one goof ball blogger or lazy journalist to reprint a hoax and present it as factual. From there, stocks can rise and fall based on false information.

Already, SMS Text News is “reporting” that Google is buying Vodaphone. The VAR Guy sensed “hoax” from the blog entry’s very first sentence. Alas, some readers will surely consider the information factual. At the bottom of the blog post, SMS Text News concedes the report is a hoax.

But does anyone actually read an entire blog post these days? (The VAR Guy certainly hopes so…)