Alex Brooks wrote a fantastic piece on World of Apple entitled “You’ve All Gone Lala.” The piece was about the shoddy reporting by various online publications who connected the appearance of 30-second song previews in Apple’s web based iTunes.

the apparent appearance of song previews in iTunes Preview and the existence of Lala in Apple’s back pocket means that apparently the two are related.

Here’s why that is complete misinformation:

• Apple has had 30-second previews in the iTunes Store since its inception. As of iTunes 9 the iTunes Store has been built in HTML and rendered using Webkit, the same rendering engine which Safari uses. Surely wouldn’t be difficult to use the same technology for previews on both platforms.
• Lala’s streaming license has been said in the past to be non-transferrable, not a clear cut reason I’ll admit.
• Apple has been making song previews available via iTunes Store RSS feeds for years.

Alex goes on to  list many of those who falsely connected Lala with the 30-second previews.

I let this story pass by because I didn’t believe Apple needed to own Lala in order to add 30-second previews to their web based iTunes preview pages. But, I basically didn’t report on it because I didn’t think it was significant, whether Apple owned Lala or not, this was a logical step forward and therefore would have happened.

I guess I’m just amazed that nearly all of the big technology news sites reported on it, and did a poor job at that.