PaidContent reported a few days ago that the Associated Press has branched out into digital distribution by making content available through tablet-based reading apps Pulse and Flipboard. The AP is not providing the readers with all its content, but making available “a selection of international and national news and associated images.” This will include special coverage focusing on this year’s Presidential race, in both cases. Given the AP’s past parsimonious behavior, I find it a little funny that it’s taking so readily to social newsreading apps that will let their users share AP content with their friends and on...

This past week, Google launched its new Flipboard-alike Currents app, but Flipboard hasn’t been standing still either. The company launched a scaled-down version of its iPad reader app for the iPhone. (Alas, it requires at least OS 4.0, so it won’t run on my first-generation iPod Touch—not that I’m really surprised.) The app proved to be so popular that the added demand took down Flipboard’s servers for a while after its release. (Something similar happened after the original iPad app was released.) I suspect Flipboard may not have too much to worry about from Currents just yet. Meanwhile, cloud...

On Elezea.com, blogger Rian van der Merwe shares some thoughts about the unsightly clutter that has been showing up on webpages for some time now. He cites as examples a Harvard Business Review article that has not one but two overlapping ads in front of it that must be clicked to be removed, and Cracked.com “where in my unscientific estimation about 15% of the page above the fold is devoted to the actual text of the article.” And there’s other clutter, too: a multitude of social network “like” buttons and follow-this-site social network and RSS feed links, There are...

CNet has an interesting, fairly long interview with Josh Quittner, who was formerly the director of Time Inc.’s digital magazine strategy as well as Time.com’s editorial chief before quitting to take a job as editorial director for Flipboard. Quittner is a veteran tech journalist and editor, which makes it all the more fascinating he would take a position at such a young startup. Quittner explains that he was drawn to Flipboard by the changes that are taking place in the context of magazines. Flipboard represents a chance to break out of the traditional one-size-fits-all template magazines have used...

It used to be that the term “aggregator” was generally used for on-line services such as Google News that pulled together articles from a variety of sources to provide a web-based news summary more inclusive than any one source alone. Then Flipboard came along, showing a completely different way of gathering and displaying news on tablets. Needless to say, when something new and original comes along, the rest of the world immediately tries to copy and improve upon it. So now PaidContent has a comparison chart of Flipboard and eight other news aggregation apps: Pulse, Zite, SkyGrid, Editions, and...

I’ve already mentioned the deals Flipboard has been cutting with magazines to carry their content, but the people behind the iPad social media reading app seem not to be content to rest on their laurels. Flipboard Chairman and CEO Mike McCue has said the company hopes to enter into agreements to carry movies and episodes of TV shows via its platform. McCue plans to get started on this project by the end of the year. McCue also plans to create an iPhone/iPod Touch version within a few weeks. (I have scant hope it will work on my old 1st-generation...

In partnership with Condé Nast, e-magazine app Flipboard has started introducing advertising to some of its feeds, beginning with The New Yorker magazine. But Flipboard users need not fret that their app is going to go the way of the web, with intrusive advertisements that distract from the content. Flipboard CEO Mike McCue insists that the app is going to follow a more magazine-like model. “In many cases, people often look to magazines for the advertising,” [McCue] said. “That’s not the case with web ads. It has a lot to do with the format of online...

Scribd is launching an iPhone app called the Float Reader, through which it hopes to become “the Netflix of reading.” Unfortunately, I can’t try this app out on my first-gen iPod Touch—it requires iOS 4.0—but from the news coverage it looks like an interesting attempt to bring some of the benefits of iPad-only reader apps like Flipboard to the smaller smartphone interface. The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or...

Remember when the New York Times got upset about RSS reader Pulse making use of its feed? And Gizmodo wondered whether Flipboard was legal for the use it made of publishers’ content? The controversy is popping up again with iPad news app Zite. Zite is a remarkable iPad application and I’ve been meaning to review it for a while now. Essentially, it’s a sort of “Pandora for news”—it looks at your social network feeds and, rather than aggregating news posts from those feeds like Flipboard, tries to guess what sorts of news you’d be interested in, and goes...

EBookNewser and a number of other sites are reporting that The Daily has extended its two-week free trial period to at least February 28th. It has also been reported that The Daily will henceforth come with a two-week free period for any new subscriber who downloads it, even after the extended trial ends. On AllThingsD’s MediaMemo, Peter Kafka reports that The Daily will also be expanding to Android tablets in the second quarter of 2011. Not too surprising given that it needs to find as wide a paying audience as possible in order to meet its costs and turn...

Flipboard has scored another magazine coup, ReadWriteWeb reports, adding a feed for Rolling Stone Magazine and demonstrating once again why they’re still the best way to read magazine and magazine-style content on-line. The new section is essentially a tweaked presentation of the @RollingStone twitter feed, adding a bent-back-magazine-style frame for the smaller version of the article rather than a scroll-up half-screen version. (This frame seems to be used for all their content partners’ publications, since they know the source will never be bigger than a tweet.) As a result, sometimes short-form tweets share the overview page with framed...

I was looking at a post on ReadWriteWeb about The Daily today, and finally got around to reading through the current edition myself. I find I am largely in agreement with Richard MacManus about the relative blandness of the news on offer. He calls it “middle-of-the-road fare, with a few seemingly token geek stories” and suggests that Flipboard is altogether a better iPad newspaper equivalent. I looked through today’s articles on The Daily and found an opinion piece about the possible death of chain bookstores (which I may very well blog tomorrow when I have more time to type),...