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Incredible success has done something very strange to Apple. There was a time that every Apple employee, from Steve Jobs on down, seemed to understand that beyond mainstream journalists like Mossberg and Pogue, their secret marketing weapons were high readership blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget and Boy Genius Report.

Apple understood that such blogs were “must reads” for their target audience and gave them the perfect way to communicate directly with their fanboi armies. Back when the iPhone 3GS was released, blogs like Gizmodo for instance read like Apple advertisements, offering unstinting, constant praise of every move Apple made. In return, the blogs got access to information and devices, invitations to events, quality time with key Apple staff in Cupertino. That kind of access increased their traffic, which increased Apple’s reach….a win/win for both.

However, sometime leading up to the iPhone 4, Apple marketing changed the rules.

Apple somehow neglected what they had always seemed to understand, that leaks create excitement and hype in the tech buying community, and this kind of geek enthusiasm creates mainstream awareness. There have always been leaks, often seemingly orchestrated by Cupertino, to key bloggers….but for some reason the iPhone 4 leak on Gizmodo was different. Maybe because for the first time, the leak didn’t have Apple marketing’s fingerprints on it…maybe the leak was too complete.

Either way, Apple seemed to ignore the fact that Gizmodo’s reporting was fanning the hype to unstoppable level. In my opinion this hype contributed enormously to their record opening sales of the iPhone 4. Gizmodo gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of free publicity. Once upon a time Apple would have let the matter slide with a few no comments…this time, the waded in with lawyers and the police and a few search and seizure warrants against Gizmodo bigwigs. Since then Giz has continued to report Apple products, it has even continued to fawn over them…but the tone is different. More…willing to mock Apple, especially Steve Jobs. More willing to praise other companies at Apple’s expense. The Apple is a bit less golden at Gizmodo now, mainly due to Apple’s behavior towards what they once viewed as a valuable asset worth encouraging.

Now Apple seems to be making the same mistake with the Boy Genius Report, one of the best read and most respected phone blogs around. BGR published now infamous emails between a user and Steve Jobs (supposedly) in which Jobs downplays the iPhone’s antenna woes and ending with, according to the first report, ended with telling the user that it is just a phone. Considering that Jobs tends to say that iPhones are anything BUT just a phone during sales pitches, this added to recent reports of arrogance from  El Jobso to make for quite a little controversy in our neck of the internets.

A day or two after the emails were published, BGR printed a correction, stating that the last line and the last line only had been misattributed due to an email mixup, and the user had written the “only an iPhone” line as sarcasm, not Jobs at all. OK, such things happen and they corrected as soon as they realized it.

However, Apple has now come out and said the ENTIRE email conversation didn’t happen, or at least it wasn’t with Steve Jobs, and that it is all a lie cooked up by this user and the Boy Genius Report.

The BGR has taken offence and responded, filling in all the backstory and publishing the email headers which several people with insider knowledge have said list the names of actual Apple mailservers.

Into the mix comes AppleInsider’s somewhat notorious Daniel Eran Dilger who says that the exchange had been offered to AppleInsider earlier for money (why someone would offer an email exchange critical of Apple to AppleInsider which is NEVER critical of Apple and expect them to pay, they don’t explain), which they refused to pay, and that email headers are easily faked, so likely the mails are all bogus since Apple says they are…this despite the fact that Jobs admitted during All Things D that he has taken to sending emails to customers using just such pithy one liners, so it is at least possible that these came from him, too.

So now Apple is willing to smear and attack Boy Genius Report, possibly alienating another important blog? That is so unlike Apple, especially since with the last line properly attributed, this story was on the verge of just going away. Until they came in calling BGR liars, all we had was a series of emails that made Jobs look a bit arrogant and dismissive…big deal, everybody says that about him anyway. When you have people lining up to tell you that you are the greatest Business Executive of the last 100 years, why is a little arrogance towards the little people surprising?

By denouncing BGR in this way and calling their creidibility into question (and having Dilger help), Apple forced Boy Genius Report to try to prove the emails are legit…and if they DO prove they are legit…then what Apple is really saying is that Steve Jobs isn’t really writing all those emails that fans seem to cherish so much, but he has marketing flaks doing it. Does Apple REALLY want to say that? Do they REALLY want to alienate another major blog?

What has gone wrong in Apple’s marketing department?