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There are any number of amusements to be found on Google Maps, candid images of the world captured by Google's car-mounted cameras, but I couldn't resist passing this one along.

It looks as if southbound on Merchant Street in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a lousy spot to have a camera mounted on a stalk on the roof of your car.

Open the link above and click the forward arrows. You can watch as the car heads toward the low-clearance bridge, then see the view go askew, then see it corrected again, apparently because the camera was remounted correctly.

Or you can watch the drama unfold in the screenshots below.

Google Sightseeing, which collects entertaining Street View moments, also found this case of a Street View car getting stuck in the mud in Australia.

(Via Paul Buchheit.)

Here comes the bridge.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Whack. The camera no longer points forward.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Now the camera flopped backward to show to the car's rear window.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Whew! The camera is restored to its rightful position.

(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

April Fools' Day has hit the Internet and, as usual, there's no shortage of fake news stories, gag product announcements, and corny jokes. Some are funny. Some are sort of lame attempts at being funny. Here are some of the ones we think are worth highlighting, and we'll be updating this throughout the day as we catch wind of more.

None of these links are Rickrolls. I promise. That is so 2008.

• A couple of blogs (including reputable tech stalwart Engadget) were legitimately punked by an early hoax: the "Hotelicopter," which claimed to be the world's first flying hotel--converted from an old Soviet military helicopter.
• Security blog TechJaws announced that Microsoft had finally acquired Yahoo. Um--yawn.
• One of the best April Fools' jokes this year comes from The Washington Post, with fake exploits of the much-hyped Conficker worm rolled up into what appeared at first to be a straight news story.

Gmail's "autopilot" filters
(Credit: Google)
• Google, known for its April Fools pranks, pulled an odd one this year with the introduction of a fake artificial intelligence research project called CADIE. Naturally, CADIE is a disaster: the project determines that the best Web design resembles something out of 1997's backwaters. (There's also a mobile "Google Brain Search," a Gmail "autopilot," and a 3D version of its Chrome browser.)
• The Google-owned YouTube played its videos upside down.
• Broadband media blog VideoNuze announced that YouTube and Hulu had merged but were still searching for a new name.
• Amazon Web Services unveiled a new plan for cloud-computing systems hosted on blimps.
• Ice cream company Ben & Jerry's created a fake Web site, Cyclone Dairy, which claims to only sell milk coming from cloned cows. But in a press release, Ben & Jerry's explained that it does hope the prank will raise awareness of the ethical and health issues surrounding cloned livestock.
• Social news site Reddit rebranded itself as "Reddigg," aping the color scheme and layout of its rival Digg.
• The U.K. newspaper The Guardian announced that it was shutting down both its print edition and Web site, turning instead to a Twitter-only format. "Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters," the announcement read.

Box.net's faux Twitter-stye service randomly cuts out parts of your words.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
• Box.net, meanwhile, argued that 140 characters is too long and launched a gag product called Chirper, which promised to shorten tweets to 50 characters for easier consumption. It actually works, but, um, we doubt you want to use it.
• Image-editing company Aviary announced "Crane," the world's first "paper based image editor," which uses a physical "Pencil Tool."

Opera's "facial gestures"
(Credit: Opera)
• The makers of the Opera browser announced that they were introducing face-gesture browsing.
• Social-network app company SGN, which owns the cutesy virtual pet app FluffFriends, dressed up its cartoon animals to look like killer mobsters. They still don't look very scary.
• College search site Unigo added a fake college, Cornmouth University, to its directory. Company employees have been Twittering that they spent spring break there.
• An e-book company called Smashwords put out a fake press release announcing that the entire "Harry Potter" series had been self-published on its service by author J.K. Rowling. Self-aggrandizement, anyone?
• Ladies! TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is hunting for a wife and has enlisted a matchmaker! "I understand I don't have much to work with here," she wrote on TechCrunch. "A sedentary 39 year old single man who made questionable career choices and now blogs for a living just doesn't look good on paper...As far as I can tell his diet consists almost entirely of burritos from Chipotle."
• Wikipedia's annual homepage makeover again tweaked its "In the News" and "Did you know..." section to put a fake spin on otherwise real stories. "HBO television network broadcast midgets racing for prizes in a chili bowl" is technically true, but it was actually midget-class race cars in an event known as the Chili Bowl.
  
  (Credit: Wikipedia)
• Microsoft created a fake trailer for a Guitar Hero-like Xbox 360 game called "Alpine Legend."
• A Digg employee created a fake Web development framework called "PHP on Rails" or "Phails," a pun on Ruby on Rails and PHP. In fact, it's a jab at the terrible marketing banter that's so prevalent in the developer world.
• The people behind the "Shorty Awards" ceremony earlier this year created a spoof page for "Twitter Pro" accounts and enlisted some friends to add "Pro" watermarks on their user pictures.
• Some guy created FreakingHugeURL.com for people who consider themselves too cool for URL shortening services like TinyURL and Bit.ly.
• And in what could turn out to be the biggest joke of all, that Conficker worm has turned out to have more bark than bite so far.

Teens in Tech, a blogging network that's written by young adults, announced Friday that it has acquired Youth Bloggers Network for an undisclosed sum. According to a post on the Youth Bloggers Network blog, both companies "decided that by joining forces, our projects could help each other vastly." Going forward, the combined company wants to create unique Wordpress themes, e-books, coupons, and a variety of community features "to slowly transform Youth Bloggers Network into a social network for young and teen bloggers."

Kardia Health Systems, a company that was formed to commercialize the Echocardiography Information Management System from the Mayo Clinic, will launch an online reporting system for vascular laboratories this weekend. The Web-based platform will allow doctors to communicate with patients and other practitioners over the Web detailing a patient's vascular information and past procedures. The company claims users will be able to focus more on patient services by deploying the platform.

GetJar, an independent mobile app store, announced Friday that it has topped 400 million mobile app downloads since its launch in 2004. Over the past month alone, it has witnessed a 200 percent increase in downloads over the same period in 2008. The company claims that based on its download figures, its app store's popularity is second only to the Apple App Store. GetJar's store provides apps for over 1,300 different handsets.

ConnectedVentures, owner of online comedy site CollegeHumor, has acquired sports satire site SportsPickle, the company announced Thursday. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and there is currently no word on whether SportsPickle will remain a separate entity or be rolled into CollegeHumor.

Now that the winter break is over, college students are inundated with work and need to worry again about classes, studying, and tests. So, of course, they'll spend time on Facebook instead. But there are other useful and entertaining sites worth the student's visit.

This is a brief list of four outstanding resources that can help students in college. No student should miss the opportunity to use these sites.

DormNoise
If Facebook isn't good enough for college students, they can try out DormNoise, which is another social network designed specifically for them.

DormNoise is centered on a calendar system, which provides students with a visual look at upcoming campus events, student group meetings, and personal engagements. That calendar is the central hub for the site and others can see what students are up to at any time. It's a unique way to connect with others and it actually works quite well to simplify that process and keep abreast of campus events.

That said, the site isn't open for anyone to join--users must be between the ages of 18 and 24 and sign up with a ".edu" e-mail address. If the school is not recognized by the system, you can't sign up for the service. In fact, my alma mater isn't supported by DormNoise. DormNoise should eventually support every school. We hope.

Once I finally signed up for DormNoise with a different address, I found it to be a unique service that will help college students manage their lives. But there's one catch that can't be overlooked: the community is small, which means few people find reason to use it instead of a site like Facebook.

It was a marathon evening for media buffs as Barack Obama beat rival John McCain to become the United States' first African-American president-elect. You couldn't miss it on Twitter, as the microblogging service exploded with election updates, commentary, and speculation.

Miraculously, Twitter's servers lasted the night, and had quite a lot of terrific, 140-characters-long election commentary (in messages known as "tweets") to serve up for hungry news hounds. Here are 10 of CNET News' favorites.

10. One of Barack Obama's most-buzzed campaign innovations was announcing his running mate choice via text message. It not only bolstered the young candidate's image as the nominee of choice for tech-savvy youth, but it also gave his campaign a huge repository of cell phone numbers--and nobody was surprised when Obama used them on Election Day. It even got on some users' nerves: Twitter user FinanceGirl expressed her frustration: OMG, Obama! Please stop texting me!

9. In the interest of shameless self-promotion, this one comes from CNET News' own Josh Lowensohn, who asked at the conclusion of Obama's music-filled victory speech, This remind anyone else of the end of Return of the Jedi? With CNN using holograms to bring remote correspondents into the studio, Princess Leia-style, he's got a point.

8. If you were following the election feed on Twitter during Obama's acceptance speech, at one point, the conversation turned entirely to puppies. Backstory: Obama had promised his two young daughters that he'd give them a puppy if he won the election, and as he thanked his family in the speech, he mentioned that, yes, they'd get the dog. From the twittering masses came plenty of OMGs and adorable-speak, but Twitter user Dennis Yang had a different thought in mind: obama, do I get a puppy too?

7. Los Angeles-based twitterer Bill Palmer noticed that literally everyone caught election fever: homeless guy on Hollywood Blvd with a sign that says "Obama aint the only one who wants change"--now that's clever. McCain supporters, insert your own potshot about "spreading the wealth around" here.

(Credit: Twitter; The Onion)

6. One of the funniest Twitter accounts to follow during the election was the account for satire newspaper The Onion, and it was in high gear. Members of Twitter were encouraged to tag their tweets with #twitvote to provide election updates; The Onion naturally started planting fake ones. The best of the bunch: #twitvote 9:39 a.m. Dr. Monopoly Pumpernickel was denied a vote after he was shown to be nothing more than 3 small children in an overcoat.

5. Another pretty sweet tweet from The Onion: #twitvote: 5:57 p.m. Donald Pauley of Pickerington, OH fled the polling station when his voting machine asked, "Shall we play a game?"

4. As voting lines reached record lengths around the country, CrunchGear blogger Peter Ha told everyone via Twitter to calm down: If you can wait three+ days to buy a damned iPhone then you can wait (in) line to vote, a**hats. Crude, yes. But he gets his point across.

(Credit: Twitter; jdmcleodjr)

3. One of the biggest success stories of the election cycle--you know, besides the guy who won--was FiveThirtyEight.com and its owner, Nate Silver. The election prediction site sprang up out of Silver's experience predicting baseball results, and twitterers were in awe when FiveThirtyEight's predictions turned out to be almost completely dead-on.

Twitter user jdmcleodjr has some ideas for what he should do next: Incidentally, Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com ought to take his act to Vegas. Well, if you've mastered baseball and national politics, there must be only one frontier left to conquer--poker!

2. It was a thrilling evening for Obama supporters, but some people have really been left out in the cold--namely late-night talk-show hosts and stand-up comedians who have said in the past that the now-president-elect simply isn't wacky enough for joke fodder.

Remember how thrilled comedians were when he learned that Obama was bad at bowling? They'll have to be more creative now, as Canadian comedian Peter Cianfarini twittered: Do you people have any idea how much more difficult you've made it for comedians? We needed McCain & Palin. I hope you're all proud! Defeated veep candidate Sarah Palin, after all, will be associated with Canadian comedy for years to come.

1. And our official "best election tweet" award goes to Twitter user JHix, who wrote about his voting experience: Officially just played the worst video game ever. You mark people with an "x" and then wait almost forever to find out who won.

Google's robots.txt file wards off brains-devouring zombies.

(Credit: CNET News)

Google, whose servers constantly crawl the Web, doesn't have anything against spiders. But zombies, well, that's another matter.

Showing some timely techie humor, the search giant updated its robots.txt file for Halloween. For the uninitiated, search engines trying to index Web sites look for robots.txt files for instructions about whether they're permitted access to particular pages.

The Google robots.txt file on Friday begins with the following exclusion:

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

Most of the time when people do this sort of thing it's called an Easter egg. Is there such a thing as a Halloween egg?

(Via Matt Cutts.)

Media "discovery" site StumbleUpon announced Tuesday that its video service, Stumble Video, has a host of new content available: content sites College Humor, Funny or Die, and VBS.tv, as well as video-hosting sites Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Veoh.

Stumble Video, which uses past preferences to pick out videos that a member might like--in other words, a nifty procrastination tool--already amasses content from big sites like YouTube, MySpaceTV, and Metacafe.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay last year, about six months after it debuted the Stumble Video feature. There's also a specialized version of Stumble Video for Nintendo's Wii console.

Now go ruin your productivity level. As for me, Stumble Video just told me I might want to watch some Daft Punk videos.

Privacy advocates should take note of an effective way to avert the prying eyes of Google Street View: the lowly plastic bag.

Google Street View foiled by a plastic bag.

(Credit: Google)

A block of College Road in Fairbanks, Alaska, along with portions of Minnie St. and Third St. show what a driver would see only if wearing a plastic bag on his or her head. As Google Sightseeing observes, you can tell what it is by the fact that it says "plastic bag" on the inside.

So now perhaps we know which scheming multibillion dollar search engine is behind San Francisco's ban on plastic bags.

The We Demand Donuts group takes a jab at those who objected to Flickr's new video service.

(Credit: Flickr)

First came Flickr video on Tuesday. Then came the anti-Flickr-video outcry on Wednesday. Now there's the anti-anti-Flickr-video outcry.

This last movement takes the highly facetious form of Flickr's new We Demand Donuts group. "If we get 20,000 people to join the group Flickr will be forced to give us free donuts!" the group's manifesto states. "Join the group and invite all your contacts. We will make this the biggest protest group on Flickr and force them to give us free donuts!"

There are some subtleties here, but given the timing, it's pretty clear that this group's raison d'etre can be translated as, "Give us a break, Flickr members who are signing petitions demanding that Flickr scrap its new video service."

More than 550 have joined so far. The No Video on Flickr group has more than 9,700.

Update 8:08 a.m. April 11: Flickr capitulated, at least on a geographically limited basis. "We at FlickrHQ have heard of your noble efforts and seek to answer your cries for justice," said Matthew Rothenberg, a Flickr employee, in the group's discussion board. He promised to buy doughnuts for Flickr members who meet up at a yet-to-be-determined San Francisco shop April 16.