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.

Admittedly, I know little about the media industry in Singapore -maybe stories about public displays of affection, Sushi left abandoned on sanitary items and $115 crab legs are common-place?

Seriously, the ‘news’ on this site makes Today Tonight look like the BBC.

To be fair though, Stomp is more about social networking than journalism and is marketed as being a platform for Singapore’s citizens to create their own version of the news.

But with stories like the one above the most popular on the site, I can’t help but think that Stomp says more about Singapore’s excessive conservatism than it does about the real news going on in the country or elsewhere in the world.

Singapore’s media environment is highly regulated. Censorship is common, internet access is restricted and private ownership of satellite dishes is not allowed.

Hopefully initiatives like Stomp will help to liberate the media somewhat, but since Stomp is still owned by the ultra-conservative Singapore Press Holdings, it seems unlikely that it can ever be a truly democratic medium for user-generated or citizen journalism.

Here’s a lecture from Jennifer Lewis, editor of Stomp (warning, almost an hour long):

The bitter old guard say this is the very thing that is destroying journalism and that real ‘in the field’ reporting is now dead and gone.

I don’t know about that, but I know that my work colleagues and I do 95% of our interviews over the phone and the majority of our research begins and ends with Google.

I don’t have the time or the word count to debate whether this is good or bad journalism, but I know it makes my job a hell of a lot easier and for this I am grateful.

But the internet has already progressed far beyond Google and we now have even more sophisticated tools at our disposal.

Here are some of them in easy to read point form. Click on each for a more detailed explanation than I have the room for:

* RSS or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ – Trawls the net for your favourite content and feeds it to your hungry RSS reader.
* Technorati – The Google of the blog world. Here’s an edublogger post with a good overview of Technorati.
* Moblogs – Not hip hop slang for more blogs, but actually geek slang for mobile phone blogs.
* Podcasts – Do I really need to explain?
* Vlogs – A blog… on video
* Twitter – What are you doing?
* Del.icio.us – The humble bookmark has evolved.

Just for fun, here is a twit’s guide to Twitter: