So when he blogged about how mad he is at Dell computers and their poor customer service, people paid attention -millions of them in fact.

Traffic to his media analysis blog, Buzzmachine, doubled after word spread of his hatred for Dell, now famously named Dell Hell (Google it). Here is what he posted on June 21, 2005:

Dell lies. Dell sucks

I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I’m having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn’t work, maxes out on CPU usage. It’s a lemon.

But what really irks me is that they say if they sent someone to my home — which I paid for — he wouldn’t have the parts, so I might as well just send the machine in and lose it for 7-10 days — plus the time going through this crap. So I have this new machine and paid for them to FUCKING FIX IT IN MY HOUSE and they don’t and I lose it for two weeks.

DELL SUCKS. DELL LIES. Put that in your Google and smoke it, Dell.

Trying to imagine how Dell would go about smoking through a Google is blowing my mind and probably yours to, so watch this instead:

I like Jeff Jarvis and I like Buzzmachine even more. It’s simple, it’s smart and it’s so popular it can actually change the way a corporation the size of Dell conducts business.

BTW: For the record Jarvis and Dell have since kissed and made up.

This worked great for years, but in an increasingly controlled world, forward-thinking people began to question whether what they were seeing on the news was really the full picture.

Just as it has almost everything else in the world, the internet changed all that.

Now we can tune into Youtube, vlogs and any news source we like and get the side of the story we want to see, not a polished edition made for dinnertime viewing.

At the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’, much ado was made about Al Jazeera being the mouthpiece for Al Qaeda. (For more on that watch the fanastic doco ‘Control Room’. You can watch and/or download the whole thing here).

In an increasingly muddy war however, Al Jazeera proved to be more democratic then western media who shy away from the blood and guts reality that face Iraqis and Afghanis every day and that Al Jazeera are not afraid to report on.

But even Al Jazeera has an agenda.

The internet liberates us all though and with a simple Google search you can find some completely unadulterated footage from all sides of the war, including the extremists’.

Trust me, I did it and in my first page of searches I had easy access to a video of the beheading of Nicholas Berg… truly disturbing stuff and I don’t recommend you go looking for it.

As the website that hosts the video says though, it is important it is made available to those who wish to view it.

Back on topic now, I don’t think vlogs are ‘online tv’.

TV is a regulated medium governed by advertising. The one thing vlogs have going for them, is they are completely independent. Vlogs are now just as important contributions to the media as broadcast journalism.

The only problem is that for every Alive in Baghdad, there is a million of these:

Incidentally, we had a guest speaker come to work today. John Silvester, much respected crime reporter for The Age and author of Underbelly: The Gangland Wars gave us some sound advice: “No matter what happens, it’s the quality of journalism that counts.”

So from Australia we have the above story sounding like the far-off ringing of funeral bells. With the right kind of ears you can hear the nails being hammered into print journalism’s coffin. Compare this with the rise and rise of South korea’s Ohmynews, who are not just adapting to, but dictating trends in online news. Hard to believe when you consider the Korean War of the early 50’s. Infrastructure in the country was destroyed and an economy was virtually non-existent throughout the 60’s. The Koreans proved industrious though and slowly built a stable and profitable economy. Heavy censorship of South Korean media in the 80’s led to widespread condemnation and resulted in heavy liberalisation of the media in the late 80’s.

What I found most interesting in the reading this week, is the side-comment that legislation prevents Koreans from owning both a newspaper and a TV station. There’ll be no News Ltd or Fairfax duopoly in South Korea, thank you very much. They prefer to let the people do the reporting, and who could argue with that. It means no marketers, managers and faceless CEO’s wielding overwritten emails about “a period of centralisation of business support services” (read: over the next few weeks some of you will be sacked) and means free and unfetted journalism.

It’s not all roses though. Sure, the idea of anyone being able to report the news is irresistibly democratic and free-spirited, but where is the integrity we are guaranteed from a legitimate publication bound by journalistic ethics?

Ohmy I have so much more to say…

My generation, the dreaded Gen-Y, are constantly accused of ‘wanting it all and wanting it now’. In a soulless rush for instant gratification, we shun literature, academic texts, newspapers, even road signs. Hell, anything that takes more than 30 seconds of concentration just isn’t on our radar. We don’t even have respect for the English language. Instead, we replace it with ‘txtspeak’. It saves valuable time when we’re breaking our thumbs trying to txt frantic msgs 2 our m8s u c?

In all seriousness though, now more than ever, time is money. I don’t know about anyone else, but I just can’t imagine having the luxury of sitting down and reading my favourite newspaper everyday. In fact, when I think about it, I hate newspapers, in the traditional paper format anyway.

Here’s how I get my news on a normal working day:

I shoot a quick glance at the headline of someone else’s newspaper on the train.

I get to work, bring up Google News and see what interest me. The best thing about Google is that I can see what’s happening and then choose which newspaper’s version I want to read. I’m not confined to just one paper’s version.

If I’ve got the time, I prefer to read features rather than front-page news, so i pop on over to Arts and Letters Daily. A&L conveniently source all the worthy features from newspapers all around the globe and put them all together so I can point-and-click as I choose.

After that I check my RSS feed from Metacritic which does a smiliar thing as A&L -gathering music, film, video game and TV reviews from media all over the globe and bringing them together on the one page.

Astute readers will notice a pattern here. I like my news and information condensed, or i guess you could say ‘converged’. I don’t necessarily read less than the broadsheet-brethren, I just want my information presented to me in an easily digestible format that I can customise to suit my needs.

Basically, I don’t want to read my news in a format that requires arms the size of Mr Tickle to read.

Mr Tickle: Avid reader of The Age