I get how companies have to big up their products, but RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie needs to lay off the crazy juice. As reported by AppleInsider and others, Balsille got a little over-excited and bullish when RIM beat Wall Street expectations with its quarterly earnings call, and, not for the first time, he decided to take a pop at Apple. The iPad was the target, with Balsille claiming RIM’s PlayBook is “way ahead” of Apple’s device. This being the PlayBook that’s not actually out yet, and won’t be out until March, according to Macworld, an entire month before the iPad 2’s likely to show up.

But what, specifically, makes the PlayBook so special? Balsille eludicated in a rant that some poor bastard at Yahoo transcribed in full. Some highlights follow.

I think the PlayBook redefines what a tablet should do.

Fair enough. It’ll be great to have some massive competition for the iPad, to kick Apple’s arse and ensure it continues to innovate. Do tell us exactly how you’re ahead…

I think we’ve articulated some elements of it

You’ve “articulated some elements of it”. Uh, OK. That sounds… positive.

and I think this idea of a proprietary SDK and unnecessary apps—though there’s a huge role for apps—I think is going to shift in the market, and I think it’s going to shift very, very quickly.

Those would be the unnecessary apps that are selling like hot cakes? And the proprietary SDK demanded by devs furious at Steve Jobs when he initially told them to bugger off and make web apps? Uh, OK.

And I think there’s going to be a strong appetite for web fidelity and tool familiarity.

Areas the iPad utterly fails in, what with its excellent web browser and consistent, usable interface, along with increasingly strong support from the likes of Google with web apps designed to work better on the iPad than any other platform.

Now, how do you align or go over the top on carriers and content providers? Well, we have different strategies, and that’s fine, and there may be room for more than one model, who knows.

It’s good that you’ve thought this through. You’re making Steve Jobs’s responses during Apple’s earnings calls look shoddy and ill-prepared by comparison. (Top tip: “Who knows?” doesn’t make for a confident-sounding co-CEO when you use it once. When it’s seemingly your favourite phrase, you need to be locked in a cupboard until you can learn to speak without embarrassing your entire organisation.)

And, you know, it’s a very dynamic market. Plus, there’s enormous growth and shifts happening around the world, you know.

The biggest shifts being from analysts who said the iPad would fail and who are now trying to pretend that they knew from the start it’d be huge, along with people who claimed Android tablets would immediately wipe the floor with the iPad, despite, in the main, not actually being much better than something you’d wipe from your arse.

How many fronts people want to take on contention, that’s a question you can ask. Do you want to go over the top of banks, do you want to go over the top on content, do you want to go over the top on carriers, do you want to go over the top on video content providers? I mean, who knows, you know? What part of it’s good strategy and what part of it’s a bridge too far? I mean, who knows?

And who knows what you’re talking about at this point? I’m pretty sure I don’t. More worryingly, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

There’s a lot of moving parts, but I think we’re just well ahead on the PlayBook, well ahead internationally, and extending very very well.

This being the PlayBook that’s being released in March 2011, remember.

And so, people can have their views on sentiment, but when is it a good entry strategy, and when is it a bridge too far? Who knows? We have turbulent ecosystem right now. How do you work with banks, how do you work with carriers, how do you work with content, how do you work with enterprise ecosystem?

How do you work with a co-CEO who doesn’t know what they’re talking about? Still, RIM’s certainly ahead in terms of babbling, ‘something exciting that might happen in the future, if its own bluster is to be believed’ and in looking at something successful in a market it wants to enter and yelling ‘you’re doing it wrong’ while the competition makes money hand over fist.

You’ve got to love polls versus editors. The two rarely match up, but in Time’s case, the difference is astonishing. Readers were asked who their person of the year was. Julian Assange topped the list with 382,026 votes, about 150,000 ahead of second-placed Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So, who did Time choose? Not Assange. Not Erdogan. Not third-placed Lady Gaga (146,378) nor Barack Obama (sixth, 27,478 votes), Steve Jobs (seventh, 24,810) or the rather odd ‘The Chilean Miners’ entry (eighth, 29,124). Nope, Facebook CEO Zuckerberg took the prize, despite placing tenth in the poll, amassing only 18,353 votes.

Given the fact that Facebook’s hardly been astonishing this year, and has mostly made the news for various appalling privacy issues, it’s an odd decision; and while editors shouldn’t capitulate to readers, I do wonder whether Time’s editorial team realises how far out of touch it is with the people who read the magazine.

Via BoingBoing:

It’s clear to me that kettling is punitive, not preventative. It isn’t intended to cool out a dangerous situation (if that were the case, police would release demonstrators in a small, steady dribble, defusing whatever chaos they’re trying to prevent). It’s intended to punish protestors for democratically assembling in public, and to frighten off potential supporters who would like to express their displeasure with government

A couple of days ago, I reported on the BBC’s interview with cerebal palsy sufferer Jody McIntryre, who’d been dumped out of his wheelchair during the student fees demonstration. Along with repeatedly asking McIntyre if he’d been throwing missiles (despite McIntyre saying he was incapable of doing so), Ben Brown offered the following gem, more than once:

There’s a suggestion you were rolling towards the police in your wheelchair.

The YouTube video going viral has resulted in the BBC’s Kevin Bakhurst responding on a BBC blog. Predictably (and sadly), Bakhurst defends the interview and offers no apology. In fact, he seems nonplussed regarding the fuss that’s been made about it.

I am aware that there is a web campaign encouraging people to complain to the BBC about the interview, the broad charge being that Ben Brown was too challenging in it.

In once sentence, Bakhurst manages to miss two points, which is some kind of record for anyone who’s not a politician. There’s no online campaign, just a viral video clip. And the broad charge has nothing to do with Brown being challenging—it’s to do with Brown repeatedly suggesting someone did something they are incapable of doing, showcasing either ignorance or extreme arrogance. Brown’s questioning was little different from repeatedly grilling a blind man on why he didn’t dodge something thrown at him. “You’re just making it up,” is a line one could almost have expected to hear next.

I have reviewed the interview a few times and I would suggest that we interviewed Mr McIntyre in the same way that we would have questioned any other interviewee in the same circumstances

This, at least, is pretty accurate. The BBC’s news output has been getting steadily worse for a number of years now. So, presumably, this is the way the BBC questions interviewees:

• Go into interview with clear agenda to ‘out’ interviewee in some way.
• Ask ‘challenging’ questions, hoping to get your story/agenda across.
• Ignore all responses, especially those counter to your agenda.
• Repeat until, hopefully, interviewee gets frustrated.
• End interview abruptly.
• Pull smug ‘I’ve won’ face.

BBC News should remember that it’s not Fox News. It should write it on its face using a Sharpie.

Bakhurst again:

Mr McIntyre was given several minutes of airtime to make a range of points, which he did forcefully

I’m not sure he did so ‘forcefully’; I’d say, given his condition, he did well in terms of clarity, and, given the nature of the repeated stupid questions, with a surprising amount of grace.

Mr McIntyre says during the interview that “personally he sees himself equal to anyone else” and we interviewed Mr McIntyre as we would interview anyone else in his position.

McIntyre isn’t equal to anyone else physically, though. He’s in a wheelchair, and is a cerebral palsy sufferer. This, Kevin Bakhurst, is the crux of people’s complaints, not that you were too rough in general on an activist or a disabled person. If Stephen Hawking was mugged, it would not be OK for Brown to say “did you punch your attacker in the face?” repeatedly, especially having already been told that the interviewee is incapable of such actions. But that’s more or less what Brown did, and what Bakhurst is now not fully understanding and yet is defending.

Some of the devs on my Twitter feed have started complaining about the Mac App Store approvals process. Like the equivalent for iOS, it’s down to Apple what makes the store and what doesn’t, and mistakes are already being made.

The latest victim is LittleIpsum, an application that provides a quick and easy way to copy ‘lipsum’ text to the clipboard; while not something every Mac owner needs, dummy text is used by most designers at some point, and this seems the kind of 59p app that would work very nicely in a Mac App Store, but that would be pointless from an admin/infrastructure standpoint elsewhere.

Apple’s response is that LittleIpsum does not meet the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected

What’s ‘not useful’ or doesn’t provide ‘lasting entertainment value’ is subjective and is the heart of the problem with the approvals process. Myriad games I’ve reviewed for iOS offer zero lasting entertainment value, yet the iOS App Store is littered with the things. And yet here is a Mac app that clearly has both a use and an audience being rejected, presumably because some poor sod at Apple is reviewing dozens of apps per hour and didn’t get why the app might be handy to have if you’re a designer.