American Airlines: Boarding of the Fittest

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Departurelounge

How bad has air travel in the U. S. become? We all know about the delays, canceled flights, germ-laden air, 12-hours-on-the-tarmac and all the rest. But the story my friend George shared this weekend is, I fear, a chilling portent of what’s ahead.

He and a colleague were flying back from a business trip (Baltimore to St. Louis) on American Airlines. Of course the flight was over-booked (by three people) and the gate agent offered vouchers for anyone willing to give up their seat (I think he said it was $200).

A little while later they made the announcement again, including some reference to not being able to depart until the oversold problem (now down to two) was resolved. Still no takers.

A few minutes later the agent came back on the PA and made an announcement that George recalls as:

"Ladies and gentlemen. We are still oversold and we can’t delay departure any longer. Please line up for boarding… the last two people in line will not get on this flight."

George couldn’t believe his ears. Everyone in the departure area looked at each other for a second and then stampeded, pushing and elbowing trying to insure they wouldn’t be at the end of the line.

This might just be the most chicken-shit thing yet from an airline. The gate agent could determine the last two passengers to book the the flight and break the bad news. Instead, they made the other passengers fight and claw like animals to get on the plane.

What about the infirm or women with babies, I asked. "No pre-boarding of any kind."

Yes, maybe this was an isolated incident. One gutless gate agent. But
can you imagine if this is –or becomes– standard procedure?

PageCast: Short, sweet and real

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There are just so many things I like about The PageCast, I’m not sure where to begin. First, what is The PageCast.

It’s a 60 second video by Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin, previewing the three stories that he thinks you should be watching for today. You’ll find it on the top/right of The Page. Big whoop, right? Okay, here’s some of the things I like about this simple idea (and this particular PageCast):

  • It maximizes the reach of a popular, plugged-in political reporter.
  • It’s short. One minute. Easy to watch, easy to produce.
  • It’s real. Or at least it appears real. Today’s PageCast was recorded in what appears to be Mr. Halperin’s hotel room in South Dakota (prior to Tuesday’s primary). And he obviously just came from the gym or a run. (Note to TV and Hollywood directors: THIS is what real sweat looks like. Not the little spritz you put under your star’s arms and on his chest. Save this image for future reference). And Mark hasn’t shaved yet. The guy looks like we all do on a Sunday morning.
  • Zero production. If I had to guess, I’d say he recorded this with his Mac Book sitting on the hotel desk. Probably in one take. He emails the file to some web monkey who uploads to The Page and it’s done. No crew, no director, no editing.

The news directors of our radio networks would be great at this. And their listeners/readers/viewers would eat it up.

UPDATE: My buddy Kay reports that Mark Halperin records PageCast between 7-9 a.m. (usually), wherever he happens to be and in whatever he happens to be wearing. If he’s on the West Coast, he usually records them at night. He thinks of what he wants to say just before he begins recording (or in the shower or at the gym), on his MacBook Pro (edits with iMovie).

The idea was prompted by the desire to put video on The Page, while keeping it easy to produce and watch. Just as I suspected. Simple idea, well executed.

Minority Report Billboards

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“Billboards are, for the most part, still a relic of old-world media, and the best guesses about viewership numbers come from foot traffic counts or highway reports, neither of which guarantees that the people passing by were really looking at the billboard, or that they were the ones sought out.

Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.

Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.

The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.” [New York Times]

Alas! poor Dell! I knew him, Horatio

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I’ve had a PC running Windows in my home office for… well, since there were PC’s running Windows. And before that, a Zenith running DOS. I went through a long Gateway phase before switching to Dell. And my latest Dell tower is several years old. Since getting the Mac Book Pro a couple of years ago, I only turned the Dell on to download/install Windows security updates.

And I noticed I was spending less time in my office because I wasn’t using the PC much. And I really like my little room. I missed it. So we’re sending the Dell to the farm where it can chase rabbits and play with the other computers. Replacing it is a Mac Mini.

Mac Heads will be familiar with the Mini but for your PC folks, it’s a square little slab about the size of a cigar box. No monitor, no mouse, no keyboard… just a miniature computer. But a powerful little bugger.

Dellmacmini

But the real power is how easily it networks with my Mac Book Pro. George set it up for me and I won’t try to explain it but suffice to say I can get to all the files on both computers from either computer. Lots of syncing via .mac.

Update my iCal at work… and the Mac Book Pro iCal syncs… and the Mini syncs. I can access all the photos in iPhoto on the Mac Book, as well as my iTunes library. And so on and so forth. I know my IT friends can make all of this happen with Windows but I could not.

Next generation radio

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Jerry Del Colliano shares a few ideas on “next generation radio” he’ll be presenting to an interactive session for radio executives next month:

“My view is that terrestrial radio is now a destination entertainment medium for available listeners – older members of Gen X and the baby boomers.”

“…there is no need to produce 24/7 programming online. … But the radio station of the future may only provide three hours of programming a day – that’s right, a day – and deliver it on a cell phone or mobile device.

“Podcasting will be the new radio for Gen Y.”

“The successful content provider in the future will have to unlock the genius of Steve Jobs in understanding a generation they are not in – and Jobs, arguably, knows Gen Y better than they know themselves.”

“In the past, a radio station had to be on-air, all the time and doing the same format over and over again. But in the future, new media will require radio broadcasters who want to play in this arena to be many things for which it does not presently have skills.”

If you’re interested in where radio might be headed, I encourage you to read the full post. Companies that provide programming to radio stations — like our company– are sure to be affected by the same forces. Are we ready?

John McCain’s YouTube nightmare

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“Six of the top 10 videos returned by a “John McCain” YouTube search Thursday pegged the 71-year-old as inconsistent, extreme, wooden or a combination of the three. (The one clearly favorable piece came from the McCain campaign and focused on his Navy service. Contrast that with a YouTube search of “Barack Obama.” It’s a swoon fest, with virtually all of the top entries featuring the Illinois senator at his eloquent, uplifting best.” — From LATimes.com

Damn. This McCain video has been viewed 1.5 million times. Pre-YouTube, his opponents could have assembled this video easy enough. And they could buy some TV time and air it. But YouTube just changes everything. How do you answer something like this? “They took my remarks out of context” is getting pretty lame. We’re entering (we’re IN?) an era when everything is recorded and everything shows up on YouTube.

Coppyblogger Twitter Writing Contest

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Congratulations to Ron Gould, first place winner the Coppyblogger Twitter Writing Contest. His winning entry:

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.

Second place honors went to Anthony Juliano:

“Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head.”

Thelonius Monk took third place for:

“When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven.”

The challenge was to write a story in exactly 140 characters. I fear my humble submission was too… belittling? Too pissy? We’ll never know.

“To my immediate left, a hipster dwarf leaned into his urinal, cleverly achieving a haunting reverb for his “big” finish to Unchained Melody.”

New media can’t get here soon enough

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Proto-blogger Dave Winer thinks the real problem revealed by Scott McClellan’s new tell-all book is that the press was complicit in beating the Iraq war drum:

“But corporate-owned media isn’t interested in helping us make decisions as a country, they’re only interested in ad revenue. That’s why it’s so important that we’re creating new media that isn’t so conflicted, and why the question of whether bloggers run ads or not is far from a trivial issue.”

When it comes to national media, there really are not that many outlets that need to be manipulated. Four TV networks; maybe that many cable news channels; a handful of newspapers with national reach. If you can juke them, you’ve got a lot of the country juked.

The sooner their influence is diminished, the better. There will no longer be even the illusion of “national media” and people will have to work (a little) at being informed. Sure, the willfully clueless will still head for blogs and news sites that confirm their view. But the rest of us will stop trusting (if we haven’t already) news organizations that are child’s play for political spin-miesters.