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FOR ME, IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST sight. I'd never seen anything so slim, so responsive, so good-looking. And with those kind of smarts wrapped in that beautiful package, that baby could fit in anywhere.

I'm talking about Apple's iPod Nano, one of the latest tech steps in Steve Jobs' drive to grab the world by the ears. By heaven, I wanted one the minute I saw the display ad at the “L” stop. I even went to my local Apple Store two days after the product launch and held it up to a credit card to compare sizes. The card almost wriggled free to swipe itself and bring home this latest addition to my modern lifestyle.

I held back, and I'm glad I did, because it turns out this beautiful new stranger might be hiding some ugly little secrets. For one thing, the display screen on some models apparently crack with a hard stare. For another, both screens and cases apparently are scratch magnets. On the black model, those scratches even look white, adding insult to injury.

I found all this out not from any Nano owners of my acquaintance but through the explosion of blog entries that rose up almost as soon as the cameras stopped rolling at the product launch.

It's another example of blogging as a two-edged marketing sword: When things are going the merchant's way, blog comments from happy users can be a tremendous sales tool. But if a problem appears, those blogs can turn ugly and get very personal very quickly — demanding a swift, sufficient response from the marketer if the lit fuse is to be smothered.

We've heard this before. My colleague Ken Magill outlined Dell's blogging travails in the Oct. 1 issue. But a couple of things make this Nano situation unique.

For one, adverse blog posts have the effect of blowing away a lot of the fairy dust that mass marketing can sprinkle, reminding readers of a company's past failures or lapses in customer care. In my case, reading all the complaints brought back suppressed memories of last spring's software upgrade to Apple's iTunes platform. That change took six weeks of reloads, reboots and disappointments, with no official acknowledgement from Apple of either a problem or possible solution. Help finally came from another ranter, not the company.

The magic spell of Apple's sleek Nano ads pushed that aggravation out of my mind, but the blog posts brought it back. I'm buying something like a Nano to make my life easier, not more frustrating. After all, the iPod line sells itself on design and style as much as utility.

Not that all the Nano blog posts are rants. Some defend Apple. Others are service pieces, giving instructions for making plastic cases to keep the Nano safe, advising users never to remove its protective shipping wrapper, and even suggesting coating the case somehow to stop the scratching. It's touching how far some people will go for the sake of a gizmo they enjoy. But you tell me if the marketing message Apple wants around the Nano is “I love this product, and here's how I've learned to live with its flaws.”

Finally, this Nano episode may offer a fascinating study in the relative power of paid and natural search. At this writing, Googling “iPod Nano” brings up a results page with eight paid ads and two sponsored links up top, including one from Apple. That page also serves up 15 organic results. Of the 13 results not from the iPod site, five trumpet the scratching and screen problems — and in the titles, not just the content. Three of those are blogs; the other two are news stories that refer heavily to blogs.

Even a favorable story about designers impressed with the Nano's unbreakability shows so many large photos of a scratched, screen-cracked player that shoppers can't help but be reminded of its shortcomings.

So far Apple's response has been to offer to replace the models with cracked screens, blaming supplier problems. But those bloggers with scratched Nanos are still out there, and their complaints live on in cyberspace. We'll have to wait and see how much their complaints, linked and echoed in other blogs and served up in search results, will do to counteract the millions Apple is spending on mass media ads for the Nano.

And I'll be keeping my card in my wallet until I read in some blog that the scratch problem's been fixed.