One of the craziest online screw-ups by a media company is currently playing out. Pulse News Reader by Alphonso Labs is a visually engaging RSS reader for iPad. Rather than being primarily text-based, it aims to pull in imagery for each article, providing a more aesthetic and elegant experience than competing apps when you’re working through feeds.

Pulse has been riding high: it’s well-rated in the App Store and Apple CEO Steve Jobs mentioned it at WWDC on Monday. But then things started to go crazy. The New York Times wrote a story about Pulse, but this only alerted the publication’s legal department, who forced Apple to pull the app.

Twitter went mental, bloggers were in uproar, and the app returned. Had sanity prevailed? Nope. Times spokesperson Robert Christie told the world: “We think it has been reinstated by error, and we have asked Apple for an explanation.” In a totally surreal twist, the Times itself is now covering the ongoing spat.

So what did Pulse do to anger the Times? Apparently, it had the audacity to ‘frame’ the site’s content when a full article was accessed, and it’s also a commercial product. The Times’s legal brains and talent (and I use those words loosely) decided this breached two of the absolute no-no terms regarding Times content. The fact that Pulse acts like almost every other RSS reader and Twitter client out there doesn’t entirely seem to have escaped the Times, but in one of the most boneheaded pieces of reasoning I’ve ever seen, Christie said that if other commercial RSS readers were making use of Times content, they were most likely doing so under an agreement with the The New York Times Company.

This is clearly bullshit of the highest order. No RSS reader developers gain permission/agreements with content providers, because doing so would take years, and there’s an assumption that feeds are provided freely, so you can access content. Still, this is The New York Times Company, and I had a run-in with its legal team in the late 1990s when I had the sheer cheek to ask permission to reprint (with full accreditation and a link) on my non-commercial site a single gig review from the Boston Globe. (Net result: a price-list and a legal threat for something I’d not even done.)

So, The New York Times Company, here are my helpful hints for you. Choose one of the following:

1. Stop using your heavy-handed legal morons to drag your company back into the 1990s, and recognise that if you provide RSS feeds, applications are going to—shock!—use them. And, you know, some people making apps that do might even want to eat, and so they’ll charge for their product (like you do), but they’re not charging for your content, you utter dimwits.
2. Remove all your feeds, which deals with the problem nicely, since no evil RSS readers and Twitter clients will then be able to ‘frame’ your content in the manner you find so abhorrent. Of course, you’ll then be called Mr Stupid of Stupid Town in the Stupid Corner of the Stupid Bit of the internet, and you’ll lose a load of readers, but, hey, you brought that on yourselves.

The power of search engines and social media continues to derail journalism. As a writer, it’s quite a depressing thing to see. While I myself have been asked to write articles ‘for SEO’, I have in every single case ensured that what I’ve filed is interestingly written and based on facts, with the intention of pulling in the punters but also giving them something to take away with them. Most other writers I know work in a similar fashion.

Of late, though, things have taken a nasty turn, with so-called ‘provocative’ pieces of bile lurking as serious opinion pieces or fact-based reports. These started life in blogs, with individuals aiming to get traffic and notoriety by taking an absurdly contrary viewpoint, but such pieces have now worked their way up the chain. Now, we have the likes of The Telegraph spewing out 10 reasons not to buy Apple’s new iPhone 4G.

Written by the publication’s Consumer Technology Editor, Matt Warman, it is a ten-part slice of bile, disinformation and bullshit, peppered with the odd fact and near-miss, about an unannounced product. It is, clearly, designed to get people angry and to get The Telegraph website more traffic, which presumably helps with advertising. What it’s clearly not designed for is serious debate, nor to enable people to decide whether or not the iPhone 4G (or whatever it ends up being called this evening) is for them.

Warman on Twitter clearly thinks he’s in the right. He dismisses criticism by saying he’s “upset the apple fanboys” (a very professional stance for someone who is, remember, a major publication’s Consumer Technology Editor) and claims he’s “eager to hear about the ‘glaring inaccuracies’” (note the scare quotes), despite the article’s comments thread being full of detailed criticism.

I find the whole thing terribly depressing and distasteful. The article is not absurd enough to be fun, not clever enough to be interesting, and it’s certainly not accurate nor informative enough to be journalism.

And already, the verdict is in. The iPad is great. Or rubbish. Or the future of computing. Or a huge waste of money. Krishnan Guru-Murthy wasted no time largely dismissing his purchase for Channel 4. “And you soon realise that nothing on offer is really going to transform your life the way having a mobile phone or a laptop computer did,” he says, noting that he nonetheless loves his iPad. (And, to be fair, he does later suggest it could be a laptop replacement for him in some circumstances.)

He argues that the iPad is a piece of Apple genius, in being able to sell you stuff you don’t need. While I admit that it’s hardly a piece of entirely must-have tech (unlike, say, a cooker), the iPad is a future for computing. It’s a console-style computing experience for people who no longer care for all the associated junk that comes with the Linux, Windows and, yes, Mac experience.

I’ve had an iPad myself for a few weeks now, and my advice if you’re not convinced with your purchase is this: stop worrying. Just get some decent apps and use the iPad whenever you fancy. You will find that, without even realising it, you’re using the iPad in place of a laptop, netbook or iPhone. All of a sudden, maybe a week in, the entire thing will just click.

I’ve spent quite a lot of my life over the past couple of months writing about the Adobe-Apple spat. Frankly, I’m sick of the thing and wish the two companies would either get a room or have a punch-up in the car-park, before lolling around drunk and going “I’m, like, really sorry. You know you’re my best mate?”

Today, the row took a turn for the bizarre, with Adobe posting an open letter from founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock. In it, they argue for open markets (which is fine), against closed systems (also fine), and rattle on about how in open markets, the best products win in the end (again, fine).

Where the entire thing gets smacked in the face in surprised fashion, like a foot suddenly flipping an infinite number of rakes towards the foot’s owner’s head, is when Flash enters the equation. Adobe again argues that Flash is an ‘open’ technology, and that in ‘banning’ it from its devices Apple has “taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web—the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time”.

This is total and utter bullshit and makes me extremely angry. First, Flash is proprietary technology. Adobe can bleat all its wants about publishing specifications, but the fact remains Flash is Adobe’s toy. It’s pissed off with Apple because Apple is saying Adobe’s toy isn’t good enough, and people listen to what Apple says, not least when it’s related to the newest and shiniest Apple product.

Secondly, Apple is hardly going to “undermine” the next chapter of the web when it’s a supporter of truly open web standards, such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, which are supported well by Apple’s various versions of Safari. Safari, remember, is available on all of Apple’s mobile devices.

Throughout this spat, I’ve felt sympathy for developers. It sucks that they can no longer package an app in Flash and send it to the App Store (even though such apps are effectively Flash apps and not ‘proper’ iPhone apps). I also think it’s a shame for the publishing industry that Apple’s entirely banned Flash from its platform, because many of the most interesting publishing innovations of late use Flash. However, to argue that Apple is undermining the next chapter of the web due to its stance is absolute hogwash, and I certainly expected better of Geschke and Warnock.

The media had a field day when UK iPad preordering arrived. The low-end iPad came in at a wallet-busting £429, way more than the US price of $499 after a swift currency conversion. What nasty people Apple are, yelled lots of people, ripping off anyone outside the US. All true, unless you take into account triffling little matters like VAT (added by default to UK prices, but not to US ones, since taxes there vary by state), after which point the UK’s being ‘ripped off’ to the tune of $13–$41, depending on the iPad model you buy.

Still, said analysts, the device will be a failure! It’ll be a niche product, they yelled, utterly failing to explain why if this was the case everyone and his dog’s announcing they’ll have an ‘iPad killer’ out at some random date in the future that, for some reason, they can’t confirm just yet, because, presumably, all iPad killers currently amount to CEOs having written ‘Get proles to make an iPad killer’ in biro on a to-do list.

Whether the iPad becomes a success in the UK remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: the ‘high price’ clearly hasn’t put that many people off. Already, the shipping date for new orders has shifted to June 7, meaning the initial batch has sold out.

My advice? If you don’t have £429 (or more) to spare, avoid the iPad at all costs. You might not think you want one, but you sure as hell will once you start playing with one.