Why are David Pogue and Walt Mossberg such Apple Fanboiz?
Negative | Neutral | Positive | Articles | |
Apple | 7 | 24 | 44 | 75 |
Microsoft Corporation | 3 | 21 | 30 | 54 |
Dell Inc. | 6 | 13 | 12 | 31 |
Google Inc. | 1 | 9 | 13 | 23 |
Intel Corporation | 1 | 10 | 11 | 22 |
Sony Corporation | 3 | 5 | 13 | 21 |
Yahoo! Inc. | 1 | 5 | 7 | 13 |
Sprint | 2 | 4 | 5 | 11 |
Lenovo | 5 | 2 | 3 | 10 |
Samsung | 1 | 5 | 4 | 10 |
The top 10 companies, with the sentiment scores, from Pogue:
Negative | Neutral | Positive | Articles | |
Apple | 19 | 65 | 67 | 151 |
Microsoft Corporation | 14 | 35 | 27 | 76 |
Google Inc. | 3 | 37 | 17 | 57 |
Verizon | 15 | 21 | 14 | 50 |
Canon Inc. | 2 | 14 | 8 | 24 |
Amazon Com Inc | 2 | 10 | 9 | 21 |
Sprint | 4 | 14 | 3 | 21 |
Dell Inc. | 4 | 7 | 7 | 18 |
Sony Corporation | 4 | 9 | 3 | 16 |
Cingular | 2 | 8 | 5 | 15 |
Somebody doesn’t like Verizon, eh? This begs the question of what are the companies that they tend to talk about the most… Here it is, the top 20: None of these come as a surprise, in fact none of the top 50 really come as a surprise. Verizon has by far the highest percentage of negative commentary out of all of the companies mentioned. Enough of that. Just what sorts of things are they discussing in the blogs? By turning off companies and looking at a list of top themes, we get the following… The top 10 themes (aggregated) are: Let’s see how they differ by journalist: Mossberg’s themes (stacked sentiment): Clearly, he’s happy about the direction that storage is taking. Pogue’s themes (stacked sentiment): No strong sentiment with any of his themes, but the man believes in the power of the phone. In the last bit of this analysis, let’s take a look at the themes that are associated with Apple (for both journalists). You can see that the connections are strongest between the concepts of “phone”, “software”, and “screen” (and, oh boy doesn’t Apple always have nice screens on their stuff?) For Mossberg, the picture changes slightly: There’s still a tight connection to software, but, the connection to phone is less (not surprising). But what’s interesting is the fact that he seems to be writing a lot about the connection between Apple and music (hence the tight connection to the theme of “music”). And there’s that storage thing again (”hard disk”). And here’s Pogue’s: In Pogue’s connection map with Apple, you can see the prevalence of phone and phone-related themes (cellphone, phone call, cell), and an almost complete absence of things related to music. One interesting thing to note is that the theme “music play” – probably “music player” – has a lot of negative in both maps, indicating some issues there. So, why are they Fanboiz of Apple’s? I don’t know. I do know that I’m sitting here writing this on an 8-core Mac Pro & 30? studio monitor, with a 17? MacBook Pro open next to me, so I don’t have a lot of room to make fun of anybody. I do wonder if Apple is really such an important force in personal technology that they deserved mention in 25% of their articles, tho. I will probably look at some geekier (and I mean that with all the love in my heart) tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo next, and we’ll see if a similar proportion occurs there.