Business Week reports on the saga of iLoo, the Internet-enabled portable toilet announced last week by a British subsidiary of Microsoft. Microsoft is now claiming that this was just an April Fools’ joke, despite a body of evidence to the contrary.

The ordinary custom is to announce April Fools’ jokes on April 1. This one was announced on May 2. I know missed deadlines are a way of life in the software industry, but this is ridiculous.

You really should read the whole article. But if you can’t, here’s the end:

[An MSN UK spokesman] said that MSN UK, however, has engaged in pranks before. He noted that the group once announced that it had wired up a park bench for Internet access. He then corrected himself, stating that the bench, in fact, was a real demonstration.

Evewy so often you discovew an onwine sewvice that you nevew knew you needed. My discovewy today is the Diawectizew, which twanswates any web page into one of eight mostwy humowous diawects. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

To wead the west of Fweedom to Tinkew in Ewmew Fudd diawect, cwick hewe.

Cory Doctorow points to a new tool, GetContentSize, that evaluates what portion of a Web site is content, as opposed to formatting and other junk. When applied to this site, here is GetContentSize’s report:

http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com

Total page size: 32939 bytes (not including images, attached scripts or style sheets)

…

[NO CONTENT]

UPDATE (1:00 PM): Adrian Holovaty, the author of GetContentSize, writes that he has fixed the bug that caused this site to be labeled as content-free. Now the site rates as 38.7% text content. Now that it’s fixed, GetContentSize looks pretty useful in diagnosing sites that have too much baggage and too little content.

The website statistics program I use (webalizer) lets me see what search strings people are using when they find this site via the usual search engines. November’s report is amusing.

The most common search string that led to the site is “tinker.” No surprise there. Number two, though, was “fart noises.” (That matches a Fritz’s Hit List entry, in case you’re wondering.)

This raises important questions that merit future research. Is this site known primarily for its material on fart noises? Or are there lots of people out there searching for “fart noises” and then stumbling onto this site? Readers are invited to submit explanations.

(“Fart noises” ranked highly in October, too, behind only “tinker,” “freedom to tinker,” and “fritz’s hit list”.)

Also interesting is the fact that more people found this site by searching for “ed felton” (with my last name spelled incorrectly) than for “ed felten” (the correct spelling). The misspelling appears nowhere on this site, so it must be that people link to the site using the misspelled name, or that some search engines are smart enough to correct for the misspelling.

In a related story, click here for an explanation of how Eugene Volokh’s serious, non-porn site was a search result for “kazakh girls nude”.