Leaks About Dell Battery Recall Forced Uncoordinated Anouncements

I've done a little research about how the Dell battery recall story broke because Dell seemed to be caught by surprise.

Although took them until 24 hours after the story broke, Dell seems to be using its blog to make its official announcement, rather than issuing a press release. That's real progress for a company that was ignoring the entire issue of customer service when it launched the blog a couple of weeks ago.

The first story I found about the recall was by Theo Valich, who broke the story in The Inquirer , as a rumor yesterday, Sunday, August 13.

Dell's announcement apparently had been slated for Tuesday, but seems to have been made first to The New York Times, which published it online at about 3pm EST today. It was picked up by other MSM within a few hours. Dell didn't have its information website about the largest recall in technology history ready at the same time it announced the battery recall. The site launched about 11:30 tonight.

Bloggers began telling the story at about noon today, when the story broke on Gizmodo

Apparently, Dell still doesn't consider bloggers to be journalists. It would have made great sense to reach out the the bloggers who've written about Dell with this story.

Dell finally published a post about the recall on its blog at 6:30 tonight, more than a day after the news leaked out.

Technorati, which has lists my blog as last having been updated four days ago, has yet to notice today's five new posts, including that I wrote about Dell's recall earlier today. So Technorati is -- as usual -- not a reliable source of blogosphere reaction.