Colbert started out with an entire segment on the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new iPad newspaper. (Note that this Web site, like the Daily, is owned by News Corp. Though apparently, based on Colbert’s montage, we did not cover the Daily’s launch as enthusiastically as some of our corporate siblings.)

But that was just a warm-up! Colbert really got going when he got around to the AOL-Huffington Post deal, with a drop-dead Arianna impersonation.

Even more accurate: “The Colbuffington Re-Post,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

What’s that? You want more meta? Okay. Here’s HuffPo’s repost of Colbert’s post. And now I’m a little dizzy and will have to sit down for a bit.

In practice, not that much. Particularly in the near term.

The shows are big draws for Hulu, but the site’s audience is growing very fast, and I’ll be surprised if you can detect a notable drop in its numbers this spring. And online viewers can still watch the shows at Comedy Central’s two sites, though its player is vastly inferior to Hulu’s.

But the move does illustrate the difficulty with Hulu’s business model: It is trying to build a business around other people’s content.

Hulu gets the ability to sell against network TV shows from its network TV owners–News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, GE’s (GE) NBC and Disney’s (DIS) ABC–but it can only keep 30 percent of the revenue. It generally gets better terms from other content providers, but it’s harder to get the really good stuff from them, particularly from cable TV, where programmers need to protect their existing revenue streams.

If the cable TV guys get their way and the world shifts to a “TV Everywhere” model–pay for cable TV, and you can watch all those shows on the Web, too–procuring shows will get much easier for Hulu. Because that conflict should go away.

But in a TV Everywhere world, the use case for Hulu sort of goes away too. Because in that model, you don’t really need a central hub for TV on the Web.

Meanwhile, Viacom (VIA) has now retreated from the Web’s two most popular video portals. You haven’t been able to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube since the two companies went to court, and that conflict has been dragging on for nearly three years.

So are a lot of reports about the reports of his death, which pin the blame on Twitter. Or in the case of the New York Daily News, something called a “Twitter blogging service.”

The original rumor that Lightfoot was dead may or may not have originated on Twitter–his road manager seems to think it was via “a Twitter coming out of Ottawa.” But that seems both very specific and hard to prove. If anyone can, please let me know.

But say it is true. Twitter still didn’t force Canwest, the big Canadian media conglomerate, to publish a wire report that said the singer was dead. As best I can tell, it was that story, which was picked up by various Canwest newspaper sites, that convinced people Lightfoot had croaked.

Here’s Canwest’s description of what happened:

After false rumours of Lightfoot’s death initially emerged online, Hawkins [musician Ronnie Hawkins, a friend of Lightfoot] was contacted by a Canwest reporter. In that interview, Hawkins reported that Lightfoot was dead. Based on that information, Canwest News Service sent out an alert and short story on the wire which reported Lightfoot’s death. Within minutes, Canwest was contacted by a representative close to Lightfoot who said that news of his demise was untrue. That prompted another alert on the wire which said the previous story should be disregarded because there were conflicting accounts about Lightfoot’s health.

About 30 minutes later, Canwest spoke to Lightfoot’s tour manager, [Bernie] Fiedler, and immediately moved another story on the wire reporting the singer’s death was a hoax.

In Twitter time, 30 minutes is forever, of course. And it was the first Canwest story and alert, which were indeed distributed via Twitter, that really fueled this thing. But blaming Twitter for quickly spreading a mainstream news organization’s story is a stretch.

Here’s some pithy perspective from Doug Saunders, a Canadian journalist who doesn’t work for Canwest. It comes to us via Twitter, naturally:

If a media snafu causes you to debate the role of Twitter, imagine it’s 90 years ago and instead of Twitter you’re saying “the telephone… Hearing some rumour and printing it as truth is unrelated to tech used to circulate that rumour. Same happened, faster, in 1780s.

If you’re itching to confirm Lightfoot’s health yourself, you can listen to an impromptu interview the singer conducted yesterday with a Toronto radio station. And I hope to see him make a Goldblumesque appearance on “The Colbert Report” very soon.

Until then, here’s the obligatory blast from the past:

And here’s that stunning footage of a real Australian morning show reporting Goldblum’s death that Colbert used in his bit. Note that they had time to assemble a b-roll montage before going on air with this.

Welcome once more to Weekend Update! I’ll be filling in today for your regular host, Beth Callaghan, who’s on vacation.

And what sane person wouldn’t be, after the slew of Silicon Valley silliness inspired by April Fools Day this past week? Digital pranks were the name of the game as Google (GOOG) and others heaped so many tepid hoaxes upon us that we wanted to call April Fold so as to quickly end this round of gags.

But no bag of tricks was needed for one Web site to April Fool itself into crying wolf about an imminent Google (GOOG) acquisition of Twitter, when a real story around the corner was aboutGoogle turning Turbo Tax tweets into ads.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest jokesters of them all, The Onion, won one of the biggest awards in journalism, a Peabody, meaning that the best sense of humor goes to that panel of judges. And to Stephen Colbert, who was willing to entertain (for a while) Twitter spokesmodel Biz Stone’s biz-model-less thoughts in an interview on “The Colbert Report.” Also on BoomTown this week: Facebook’s former CFO Gideon Yu is out, as was a leaked memo from Mark Zuckerberg about Yu’s departure and the company’s situation.

A sense of humor is certainly an invaluable feather to have in your cap these days. Digital Daily wrote about the most recent doom-and-gloom predictions and events to happen in this econalypse, like analysts’ predictions of YouTube losing $470 million in 2009, the barren IPO-less wasteland VCs are bemoaning and a major global slump in semiconductor sales. Other headlines weren’t quite so dreary: Google’s foray into VC land, the folks at BlackBerry HQ celebrating surprisingly good fourth-quarter results and the world’s worst-kept secret, the anticipated merger between IBM (IBM) and Sun (JAVA).

There was a similar mix of dark clouds and silver linings over at MediaMemo. The National Collegiate Athletics Association forced Twitter and partners AT&T (T) and Federated Media to take down one of its first ad campaigns, “March Tweetness,” crying copyright foul. Also running afoul with big companies in legal waters, free music Web site Seeqpod filed for bankruptcy. And video site Veoh laid off a significant amount of staff and kicked out its old CEO, replacing him with founder Dmitry Shapiro and refocusing the company on its “Video Compass” browser plug-in.

Online video is generally a turbulent space these, but the waiting is the hardest part for Hulu when it comes to the rumored Disney deal in which Disney (DIS) seems to be playing the field. Other gems of the week were URL-shrinking Web service bit.ly’s raising of $2 million and media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s Kindle envy.

In a new Mossblog, Walt Mossberg gives us his first impressions of the BlackBerry App World store in which Research in Motion (RIMM) takes a bold step into what was formerly the sole domain of Apple (AAPL). In Personal Technology, Walt reviews a network hard drive from Western Digital (WDC) that makes the technology gloriously simple for everyone. And in Mossberg Solution, Katherine Boehret takes a look at several laptop trays, designed to protect the–ahem–family jewels and family members in general from laptops’ scorching undersides.

Finally, our exciting Woz-watch, after many weeks, has come to a sad end: Steve Wozniak was voted off “Dancing with the Stars” this week after one misstep too many. Down, but not out, the Apple co-founder swore that the “geeks shall inherit the earth”… just not the dance floor, any time soon. Please.

More next week.

This morning the video site, which is jointly owned by NBC Universal (GE) and News Corp. (NWS) (which also owns Dow Jones and this site), said it will offer full episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the “Colbert Report” beginning today. The deal, which brings the popular late-night satirists to the site just in time for the presidential election, is something of a surprise, since Comedy Central parent company Viacom (VIA) has so far refused to sign on to Hulu.

But that may change if this first tentative experiment bears fruit. “I think with success breeds success. It could open some other doors,” said Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom division that runs Comedy Central. “Hulu in many ways may put the shows in front of some people who might be more casual viewers but who might be interested in what’s going on with the elections.”