The Best Digital Media April Fools' Spoofs

This story was written by Joseph Tartakoff.

New VC Fund Targets "Small, Mini, and Micro" Companies
An investment fund has raised $18 million from several banks to support companies with a maximum of two employees and only modest goals. Applications for funds should be submitted via Twitter, in no more than 14 tweets. "As this was presented to us it only made sense, since the best startups can communicate all they need to only in a few slides anyway, so why not to use something that helps the startups to be concise," says ArcticStartup, which broke the news.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Renames Live Search As 'MSN Windows Live Search on kumo@microsoft.com'
That's the latest from Microsoft's Live Search team, which says the new name results from customer research: "Danny, it's Microsoft.com, just like you asked for. Sort of. (We wanted you to know we were listening). For those of you who fear change, you can see we have maintained a deep connection to our past. All of it. Or something like that. And we've even got one of those nifty "@" signs in there that you Tweeters seem to like so much."

Guardian Goes Twitter-Only
The Guardian says it will become the first paper in the world to publish only via Twitter, a move that it says will consolidate its "position at the cutting edge of new media technology." All of the paper's archives will be rewritten as Tweets. As a teaser, the Guardian provides some examples, including one from 1961: "Listening 2 new band 'The Beatles.'"

Redditt Renames Itself Reddigg
Don't believe us? Visit the site now.

The fun continues after the jump

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Launches 'Ideological Search'
On Yahoo's corporate blog, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs, announces a service that lets users control the political bent of their searches. "If consumers have the freedom in whether they navigate to HuffingtonPost.com or FOXNews.com, why not extend that same choice to search? Until today, no other search engine could provide this level of personalization - ensuring that consumers can search with the utmost confidence, knowing that they won't be antagonized by their results," Raghavan writes." Try it out here.

Report: Japanese Find The Internet A Scary Place
eMarketer asks, "What do giant robots, tentacled monsters and Hello Kitty have in common? They are all things that cause less fear in Japan than the Internet." The research firm reports that 84.4 percent of adult Internet users in Japan have "felt at least once that the Internet is 'scary.'"

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) To Launch 'Video Street View' In London Not content with the introduction of the Google Street View feature in England, Google is backing an effort to put the city's CCTV system on the Internet, The Register reports. "On competion of the first phase, practically every square inch of Central London - including narrow alleyways, council debating chambers and police interview rooms - will be accessible from anywhere in the world," according to the publication.

By Joseph Tartakoff