Brand blogs vs. brand-complaint sites

In a story today, The New York Times writes about blogs that consumers have created around brands like Barq’s, Netflix, Trader Joe’s, Disney, Gatorade and Starbucks. These are cool, useful sites—I had never seen this Netflix organizer before, for one thing. Also, they’re a welcome sight compared with the often shrill brand-complaint sites, of which almost every large U.S. corporation seems to be a target. Somehow, when a site about a brand or corporation is uniformly negative, it just isn’t as persuasive.