Apple released another product in January, but it’s not for the general public, it’s specifically tailored for IT News outlets. It’s called iNews, and it allows journalists to automatically generate articles based around Apple products, without any thought required. In the absence of any actual news, iNews can furnish even the laziest journalist with several paragraphs of aimless text.

Let’s look at some of the output from iNews that’s been appearing on major “news” sites.

SFWeekly, not a tech site, incidentally, was not immune from filling space with, well, filler:

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/shookdown/2010/02/decision_tree_should_i_buy_an.php

Let’s get down to business, though. Wired speculates that the iPad will have a camera at some point:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/apples-ipad-thinks-it-has-a-camera/

and then… does it again:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/apple-ipad-may-ship-with-webcam/

Thanks Wired. Now I know for sure that the iPad might have a webcam. Point of fact, Wired has posted at least eighteen articles on the yet-to-be-released iPad in the two weeks since its announcement. That’s more than one per day.

Don’t worry, though, I was just warming you up. Engadget has posted a whopping 50 articles. Let’s see what the Apple news generator has excreted onto the internet for them:

Ten articles in we have a “definitive guide”, graciously suffixed with “(so far)”. Less than a day earlier, however, they already told us “everything you need to know”, so I’m not sure how many breathless play-by-plays they think we really need. Especially for a product we can’t even get our hands on for weeks.

The site, like most of the web, is falling over itself trying to find reasons to talk about the iPad. Even BoingBoing couldn’t help themselves, by fawning over the iPad’s ability to finally realise a scene from 2001 where Dave Bowman reads the news on some sort of tablet-esque reader. As one handsome poster (yes, obviously I’m referring to myself) mentioned on Digg:

Yep, thanks to the iPad, 2001 has finally been realised. Thank heaven for the iPad. It’s the FIRST tablet EVER MADE that can access information. I can’t think of a single device before the iPad that could do ANYTHING LIKE what is described in that scene from 2001. Let’s talk about the iPad some more, and all the things it does that were simply impossible before January 2010. Let’s compare everything to the iPad, there has simply been nothing like it.

Steve Jobs described the iPad as “magical” and “revolutionary”, and he’s right, because the internet has made it so. The level of news generated by a single product announcement is proof of that.

And yet, the iPad can be more realistically described as merely “quite nice” and “very niche”, but that doesn’t matter. Mr Jobs has spoken, and by doing so he has activated iNews. The news outlets must pass his word forth in many forms, and we will listen and talk amongst ourselves, and together we will form the biggest marketing machine known to man.

I should totally submit this to Digg, and then bathe in the resulting flow of irony. Or iRony.