Just as we suspected he would, Matt Drudge demanded Apple kill iDrudge, the iPhone app created by a fan to read his website. But the right-wing protoblogger then reversed himself in a stunning flip fliop. Siren time!

It seems 42-year old Drudge, who spent many of his early years publishing on AOL, misunderstood the fundamental technology behind iDrudge. He thought the app was reading a pirated copy of the Drudge Report running on someone else's server, app creator Joseph Nardone told iPhone Savior. When it was explained to him that the app just downloaded the Drudge Report from Drudge's regular servers, and neatly reformatted it, he emailed Apple and asked for the app to be reinstated.

At the moment, the app still has not returned to App Store; Apple's approval process can take weeks, so Drudge's initial email is probably seriously cutting into Nardone's income, considering that iDrudge was once the store's number one news app. Imagine: Something inaccurate, written by Matt Drudge, causing people grief. Unprecedented.

Apparently Drudge is not bothered by the lack of advertising on the iDrudge app; as Nardone wrote in a comment we just now saw and approved under our original post, Drudge himself offers an ad-free mobile version of his site:

Hi:

Thanks for the publicity. The intent of the iDrudge Drudge Reader app was not to remove advertising from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report already has a version with no ads at iDrudgeReport.com. The intention of the iDrudge Drudge Reader was to allow people who would not otherwise be able to view the Drudge Report on an iPhone due to the inconvenience of using the Safari browser to view the site. This should actually increase the traffic to the Drudge Report site and increase it's ability to attract revenue. The iDrudge Drudge Reader is merely a specialized web browser that is preset to view the Drudge Report.

Sincerely,
Joseph Nardone