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.

So you’re sitting there with your new iPad and you’ve got all you possibly can out of the built-in apps. What next? Well, I’ve spent most of my life over the past two weeks going through a massive number of iPad apps. Reviews of these are slowly making their way to iPhoneTiny.com (Twitter users might like to follow @iphonetiny), but the best have been compiled in a series of articles for TechRadar.

Visit the links below to find out the very best apps you can download for your iPad:

• Top 20 best iPad apps worth paying for
• Top 20 best free iPad apps
• 10 best iPad games worth paying for
• Top 20 best free iPad games

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.

Gizmodo yesterday ran the piece Bill Gates Told Steve Jobs About the iPad in 2007, and various tech sites have since repeated Gizmodo’s opinion verbatim. However, I think they’ve got it wrong—or at least half wrong.

After being asked about what kind of device people will be using five years after the interview (conducted in 2007), Gates talks about a future where you have a full-screen device that you carry around (say, an iPad), and a device you put in your pocket (like an iPhone or iPod touch), although he also talks about a kitsch sci-fi future in which every surface has something projected on to it. By contrast, Gizmodo suggests Jobs remains rooted in a PC-as-digital-hub strategy.

Watching the video, I don’t think this is true. Jobs continues on from what Gates says, rather than repeating him, and talks about a type of PC: “This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house”. That, to me, sounds a lot like an iPad. Or an iMac. Or a MacBook. Or even Microsoft Surface. And that is the point he’s making—the PC continues to exist, but in new form factors. And, at present, a more traditional PC of some kind does remain the digital hub–something that’s unlikely to change dramatically by 2012. (It’s also worth noting that the iPhone was revealed only a few months after the interview, so it’s clear Jobs is being cagey, rather than yelling: “Hey! We’re working on something like like right now!”)

So Gizmodo’s half right in that Gates did predict the iPad, but so too did Jobs. What’s the more interesting question—and one Gizmodo utterly fails to ask—is why did only one of the two companies these guys are involved with, Apple, capitalise on this shared vision?