Dell’s public image has been suffering as things like weblogs, search engines, and discussion forums make it possible for Dell’s customers to share their frustrations with Dell’s products and service without Dell’s meddling mediation.  Dell decides to tackle the problem.  They start a corporate blog and retain an astroturf “grassroots” communications oxymoron firm to help them assuage their most vocal critics.

One of their most vocal critics is a guy name Jeff Jarvis, an old-media guy who has a good audience in new media circles.  What happens next is priceless.  One of the interns working for Dell’s astroturf installers gets a little too into his role as an authentic human voice of Dell and totally “tees off on Jarvis in a total angry rant”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/07/11/some-friendly-advice-from-dell/.  It’s authenticity is hard to doubt, nor is the contempt it embodies.

I think Dell’s strategy needs some fine-tuning.

Big whoop, some woman on some video blog I never could be bothered to look at is no long on the video blog. I still haven’t looked at it.

Unfortunately, my disinterest is far from universal, and so half the blogs I’ve been looking at over the last few days are part of some big circle-jerk on the subject.

Update: People are actually clicking through from technorati onto this fine post simply because I uttered the magic word “rocketboom.”

Or maybe it was the combination of “Amanda Congdon” & “Circle Jerk”? For shame, boys, for shame.

A few weeks ago I blogged a link to an article about kids using a “high pitched ringtone for school situations”:http://geekfun.com/2006/05/25/too-good-to-be-true/. The kids had appearantly repurposed a horrible sound used in a teenager repelling device called the Mosquito that took advantage of the fact that most adults are deaf to high frequencies.

It seemed just too perfect a story that the kids had coopted the teenager-repeller into a method of getting away with receiving text messages in class.

I’m still skeptical about the origins, but the story has been picked up by the New York Times, and other media outlets, and I’ve been getting a bunch of hits on this blog from people looking for more info.

So, I did a little digging and found an “MP3 of the horrid mosquito ring tone”:http://geekfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/HorridRINGTONE.mp3. I’ll warn you, if you can hear it (I can), it sounds head-splittingly awful, so take of your headphones and turn down the volume.