Monday, February 14, 2005

Canal Nueve

The Gaping Void quotes a snippet from The Economist's piece on why Microsoft's director of platform evangelism Lenn Pryor hired A-list blogger Robert Scoble.

"Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly."

I'm due to fly United next week and I hope we don't run into any tipping points! But I am one of those people might find realtime pilot chat quite distracting, to a point.

However, in an earlier posting I recounted the experiences of my brother-in-law who used to fly jump seat in the jets belonging to his then employer Mexicana. He said he would have preferred to be one of the unsuspecting ungulates in the back reading the WSJ. For some people listening to bloggers like Hugh must be a bit like tuning into el Capitano!

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