Oliver Ryan has an amusing lead to his Fortune tory about buzz:
Michael Dell was mingling in Davos, Switzerland, this winter when he spotted the blogger Jeff Jarvis and went over to apologize. It had been nearly two years since Jarvis posted a series of irate messages to his BuzzMachine blog about the failings of his Dell computer. The posts eventually drew national attention, and Jarvis’s headline DELL HELL has since become shorthand for the ability of a lone blogger to deliver a body blow to an unsuspecting business.
Two years later, poised to retake the helm at his company, Michael Dell undoubtedly figured it couldn’t hurt to make nice.
All that could have been avoided if, in 2005, Dell’s operatives had had access to the services of Bay Area startup BuzzLogic, which is the newest of a generation of companies with Web software designed to spot and neutralize an incendiary blogger before a marketing conflagration ensues.
