All eyes have been on the live investigation of the phone hacking scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp media empire. True to form, the web has been abuzz on live “back channels” such as Twitter and Facebook, whilst one spritely political blog called political scrapbook, pounced on the chance to attract more followers by creating a parody of todays events – a spoof of UK search engine Ask Jeeves, called Ask Murdoch.
In essence, it’s an evasive search engine that doesn’t know very much and does not deliver any results. The “results” consist of answers such as “I don’t know anything about that,” “Perhaps you should ask James,” “I just don’t remember,” “I don’t have any recollection,” “Pardon?” and “What’s doing?”
During the inquiry, a member of the public threw a custard pie at Rupert Murdoch. Moments before approaching Murdoch with the custard pie, “comedian” Jonnie Marbles announced his intentions on Twitter.
The custard pie now has it’s own Twitter account, called MurdochCreamPie, with a bio that parodies the investigation itself, which says “I was unfairly brought into a situation that I had no part in. I’m innocent.”
Jonnie Marbles and Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s wife who deflected the custard pie away from her husband and squished it back in the assailants face, are now trending on Twitter.
So, the moral of the story is, if you want to get noticed online or more links to your blog, one strategy might be to make jokes out of current events.
Update: Now there is a Facebook page dedicated to Wendi Deng. Current contents resemble a Chinese-style human flesh search of Jonnie Marbles, where crowdsourcing is used to find more info on his flavor of comedy.