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...

TechCrunch reports that the Pulse RSS reader has added a “save to Pulse” bookmarklet and Chrome extension, to allow Instapaper- or Readability-style marking and saving of articles to be read via the Pulse reader later. As I’ve said, I wasn’t too impressed with Pulse—it seemed designed for people who just want to follow a few favorite feeds, and intentionally inimical to my own RSS reading habits in which I trawl through literally hundreds of headlines per day looking for TeleRead nuggets—but it does call attention to the way that tablets and tablet apps are starting to change people’s...

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...

I just got around to doing a software update on my iPad. Among others it fetched a new update to the Reeder RSS reader, containing a remarkably useful feature that I am extremely glad to have. Although I mentioned the Reeder vs. MobileRSS controversy last week at the time the update actually came out, the nature of the update escaped my notice until now. Reeder has added a Readability button to its user interface. When I encounter a RSS feed that does not provide the whole article (some feeds are especially obnoxious that way—most notably The Bookseller’s, which...

Shortly after Apple called it the “best iPad app of the year,” awesome social reading app Flipboard has a major new update out that adds a couple of much-requested capabilities to the social network reader for the iPad: it now supports Flickr and Google Reader feeds. As Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb reports, it actually incorporates most of the functions possible in Google Reader, including starring items, sharing items, marking as read, and so on. That’s certainly a lot more than the Pulse RSS reader has yet managed to do. I tried the new feature out, and it...

Apparently the Pulse RSS reader is feeling a little Flipboard envy. TechCrunch reports that Alphonso Labs, Pulse’s developer, is teaming up with Posterous to allow one-click aggregation of articles into a free Posterous-created blog for each individual user. Something about this seems terribly familiar. Oh, wait. That’s just like what Google Reader does. (Not to mention any RSS app, such as Reeder, that integrates directly with it. And Google Reader lets you read from more feeds, too.) In fact, integration with Google Reader’s starring and sharing system is one of the things that Pulse users have been...

Over the last few days, a new iPad media app called Flipboard has been getting a lot of attention. The app isn’t quite an RSS reader or social networking app, but seems to combine elements of both. The app, though popular, has gotten off to a rocky and slightly controversial start. The rockiness comes in that it seems that Flipboard’s developers were not prepared for just how popular their app was going to be—it seems that everyone was trying to sign up for the service at once, entirely overwhelming their servers. They responded by configuring the servers to...

The Australian reports that the developers of the Pulse RSS reader app for the iPad were invited to address News Corp App World, a private news industry conference held two weeks ago in California. The Pulse reader, you might recall, sparked a minor controversy last month when the New York Times complained about it using the NYT’s feed while charging $3.99 for the app. The article quotes an unnamed News Limited executive making a similar complaint about paid news aggregator apps: "It's quite controversial when someone takes the RSS feed and sells the app,"...

It’s no secret that I use RSS a lot in finding things to blog for TeleRead. Using Google Reader, I follow thirty or forty feeds which pop out hundreds of articles per day, and go through and “star” likely prospects, then go back to my starred list later and write up the most interesting ones. (I also share some interesting articles that I don’t blog; anyone who wants to follow my Google Reader feed can find it here.) When I had my iPod Touch, I at first used NetNewsWire, then I upgraded to Reeder when I read some good reviews...

Here’s an odd reversal. We’ve written a number of times about Apple pulling or rejecting apps from its store for fairly shaky reasons, but yesterday a story broke about Apple actually standing up for an app when the New York Times wanted it pulled down. The app in question is Pulse, an iPad RSS feed reader that has been getting good reviews, both at our sister blog Appletell and elsewhere. Steve Jobs praised it at WWDC yesterday, and even the New York Times itself gave it a glowing review. But apparently someone in the New York Times...