The Basement

On June 21^st Jeff Jarvis posted the first of his now infamous Dell bashing articles titled Dell Lies. Dell Sucks. Yesterday, Jeff posted a link to this postscript. Today it was also mentioned by Hugh Macleod – whom I recently exploited a bit and am feeling a little guilty about. At the time of the original post, I wondered if we would be able to measure the influence of Jeff Jarvis by using a tool like BlogPulse. Shortly after my post, BlogPulse has a few weeks of indexing problems which prevented me from really following up. But those problems have since been fixed thanks to the hard work of Natalie Glance and the gang at Intelliseek.

So today, I revisited my original idea, what can we learn from Jarvis v. Dell by looking at the blogosphere? In my original post, I graphed the trends for the following three queries:

dell

dell and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

(hp or "hewlett-packard" or compaq) and (sucks or lies or lemon or overheats or fucking or lose or "doesn't work" )

I lifted the list of negative word from Jeff Jarvis's original post. Well, my original trend graph had a few problems. First, I tried to include negative mentions of HP for reference. What I did not think about was that 'HP' also stands for Harry Potter. I have since written a lot about taking care when writing queries to prevent this sort of thing. For this post, I started to try to remove Harry Potter mentions but it was getting a little silly and I gave up. As an interesting aside, you'd be surprised how many folks discuss the famous children's series by frequently using the word "fuck" and it's derivatives. I particularly enjoyed this wholesome, eloquent and insightful review. But I digress...

The second problem with my original trend graph was the magnitude of all Dell mentions compared to negative Dell mentions. This scale really makes it difficult to see change in the negative mentions.

So, today I modified it a bit. I removed total Dell mentions and the HP negative mentions and added in "Dell and Jarvis" mentions. I removed the word "fucking" from my list of negative words because I say too many uses of it in the positive, i.e. "fucking awesome laptop" or some such. I also added a negative Dell comments trends that explicitly contain no mention of Jarvis. Here's what it looks like:

Click here to run for yourself.

Now, the dip between June 20 and June 30 is a little misleading – this is some of the remnants of the technical problems BlogPulse had during this period. The interesting thing here is that once Jeff started attacking Dell – and others started talking about Jeff attacking Dell – the number of people that wrote post about Dell including at least one of Jeff's negative words increased. Furthermore, these are generally not posts that are talking about Jarvis!

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of The Influentials. I think Jeff Jarvis is an Influential by the Roper definition (which I'd argue may not mean influencer). As you can see from the BlogPulse trend, mentions of Dell and negative words were edging up already – although this looks to be exaggerated slightly once Jeff started his attacks. So now for the mind bender – Did Jeff Jarvis cause this trend of Dell negativity or due to his network was he more sensitive to it and simply act (perhaps subconsciously) as an early indicator? In other words, bell cow or bellwether? Influentials tend to be pragmatic, majority adopters – not early adopters – so why did Jeff Jarvis switch to Apple and not HP or some other Windows PC vendor? I would argue that, due to his social/professional network that he inherently knows somethings the the rest of us don't quite realize yet – perhaps that Dell is suffering from growing pains and is starting to show it in the form of service failings at an increasing rate, or that the world has changed to a point that the conventional wisdom that you need MS Office on Windows to conduct business is flawed and that as long as you have a reasonable web browser you can pick which ever computer give you an I rule experience – or whatever.

As a side note, Dell has said that it's policy towards blogs and other online forums is "look, don't touch". This reminds me of my discussions about corporate blogs with the WOMMA crowd. In the Jarvis case, Dell's policy prevented them from being able to respond, defend, and investigate the source of the problem. By the time changes are made at Dell (assuming we know changes are afoot - which we don't) and those changes are seen by consumers and the consumers start to talk about it – will it be too late?

So is Jeff Jarvis bell cow or bellwether? Either way, I think Dell would be better off doing more that just listening.

In his post How Not to get Fired for Blogging he mentions the domain ihatemyjobandmyboss.com. Don't bother clicking on it, there's nothing there...yet. But if you hurry over to Dotster and register it for $15 and the pay the $10 for DNS - you can be there.
[UPDATE: Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner. The domain of mention was registered by Anthony DeFreitas of Snellville, GA on Aug 1, 2005.]

Why haven't I done this already? Karma. I've already done it once today after seeing this post from Hugh Macleod and I want to spread the wealth.

When heavily read bloggers make offhanded references to unregistered domains they create an opportunity for someone to be standing where everyone else will soon be looking. And if you're wondering if you'd get any traffic...you would have gotten a hit from me.

So remember, if you're really desperate to get linked to by an A-lister just look for a link to crawl under.

Chris, if you happen to be reading this - I love your podcasts and, for what it's worth - my wife and I love listening to you and Ponzi. We also met on match.com and we laughed at how familiar your story sounds.