Perpetrating a media prank via Facebook or YouTube or some other combination of social media sites isn’t a new thing. Among other things, news stories have been written about a guy who (allegedly) had dumped his girlfriend in front of a huge crowd — all of whom had come to the site because of a Facebook message — with the whole event filmed and posted to YouTube. But I don’t think anything has reached the kind of scale Ouriel Ohayaon talks about in this story.

Since I’m not fluent in French, it’s hard to comprehend just how big this Facebook President hoax got, but from the description by Ouriel at TechCrunch and by Loic Lemeur, it sounds like pretty well every major French media outlet, both print and television, picked up the story about how he had supposedly been elected Facebook President and could instantly message hundreds of millions of people on the site.

To anyone who has even a glancing relationship with Facebook, this sounds pretty comical — Loic says he was called by the guy in question and dismissed him as a kook. But it’s worth remembering that not everyone is familiar with Facebook, apart from knowing that it’s really big. So why didn’t someone check into it and realize how ridiculous it was? One likely reason: No one wants to get in the way of a good story.

Hopefully there will be a little bit more skepticism about such things in the future. All it takes is getting burned once or twice.

Normally I would post this kind of thing over at my “fun” blog, because it doesn’t really have a lot to do with Web 2.0 or any of that kind of stuff, but I thought what the heck — it’s the weekend, so let’s loosen up and have some (non Web-related) fun. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while is the performance art put on by French theatre troupe Royal de Luxe, and they’ve brought their latest show to London this weekend, entitled “The Sultan’s Elephant.” The BBC has a whole pile of photos and videos, in some cases provided by cellphone camera owners and other “citizen journalists” (see, there’s some Web 2.0 to this after all).

It’s loosely based on the work of Jules Verne, and was performed in France last year. It involves two gigantic wooden puppets, one a girl about 35 feet tall and one an elephant with a fully-articulated trunk that is just as tall and about 50 feet long. They are operated by a team of puppeteers dressed in period costumes, who in some cases are pulling ropes through enormous pulleys and in other cases are sitting on a giant metal superstructure that surrounds the puppet. The photos really have to be seen to be believed.