Entries from August 2007 ↓

All I see on the local news in Detroit lately is how poor the airlines are doing and how many flights are being canceled. In particular, Northwest has become the whipping boy for the local news affiliates. For the most part, they are correct. Too many flights are canceled, too much luggage is lost. I’d like to balance it a bit with a recent personal experience.

I had a business flight to Chicago recently. For the return flight, the plane was a few minutes late arriving at O’Hare, nothing critical. We were all boarded and buckled in in record time. I was in first class, so I got to see the commotion up front. Minutes later, the pilot announced that there was a hydraulic leak and we would have to deplane while they fixed it, a process taking no longer than 30 minutes.

We all grumbled, but deplaned quickly, happy that we weren’t being held hostage on the plane. Making our way to the NW World Club , we saw a flight attendant telling us to turn around and re-board. I’ve already pre-boarded; now I get to re-board. Next I suppose is e-board.

This is where I was impressed with Northwest. So far this sounds like a very poor flight experience, but they really turned it around for everyone. We were each given three coupons:

1. US$10 or an in-flight drink
2. 1,000 World Perks Bonus Miles (or Air France)
3. $25 off the next flight

Any one of those would have been nice. Getting all three? Outstanding. Thank you, Northwest. Confidence restored.

This morning I saw an intriguing ad on television. An elderly gentleman related things he had seen as a result of his age: “I have seen an American flag with 45 stars.” He later says his name and that he is 102 years old. The ad ends with a link to pearlevision.com/ihaveseen. Sounded like it could be a fascinating testimonial site, so I checked it out. The site has the same lush B&W photography that the TV spot has.

That’s where it falls apart. A stream of attractive people (with glasses) cycles through. There are no controls, only a single link that sends one to Pearle Vision’s main site. That couldn’t be all of it, I thought. Moving my mouse over the slideshow of beautiful myopics, I noticed an occasional play button, so I chose one. It was the elderly man I had seen in the TV spot. Flanking either side of the video were previous and next buttons. Next sends one to another video, this one of an opthamologist. Previous send you back to the slideshow. That’s the entire site. No other testimonials.

What an utter waste of time. No upload link. No call to add your own story. Pearle’s agency really dropped the ball on what could have been a great concept. Maybe the site will evolve, but who’s going to wait around to see? No client or agency should cave in to releasing a site before there is content to support it. Users simply won’t return to see it through.

I don’t know how I missed this. Haven’t seen anyone talking about it. Yahoo Photos is set to shut down on September 20th. It’s certainly understandable. Yahoo Photos gets zero publicity. Their other media property, Flickr, makes the press almost daily.

Bloggers face several ethical issues, but one that is among the most confusing is that of disclosure. Not being members of the press, most bloggers are not given a set of ethics to read and sign. Journalists do and failing to abide by them can cost them their job.

Morgan Webb, formerly of TechTV is under fire from a few loud members of the blogosphere right now for that very issue. While it seems that certain people are taking this way out of context, and blowing it out of proportion without learning all the facts, they are right to bring attention to the issue of disclosure.

Read/WriteWeb’s Josh Cantone sums it up nicely:

Disclosure is a tricky business and as a practice is still ill-defined even in the realm of traditional journalism. The general idea is that anything that might be seen as a potential conflict of interest between a writer and the subject of his story should be disclosed to the reader. If I invested in a startup I am writing about, for example, or if the CEO is my best friend, I should disclose that fact. But it’s not always so cut and dry.

Josh also points out the times when you should disclose:

1. financial association
2. employment
3. competition
4. and personal involvement

The second point, employment, is of concern to the authors of Buzz Lounge. As employees of an ad agency, we feel we must be honest and upfront about who we work for whenever we are responding to comments on other blogs. Besides, it’s so much easier to be honest, isn’t it?

Shark Week used to be something we all looked forward to each year on the Discovery Channel. A few years ago, the Discovery Channel abandoned science programming in favor of catering to America’s unending supply of white trash with appalling programs like Monster House, Monster Garage, American Chopper, etc. Shame. Even Shark Week had become a joke, with shark shows on for only a few hours at night.

This year they came to their senses and took Shark Week very seriously. Not only is the shark programming constant, they released a killer Web 2.0 game called Shark Runners. I am hooked. You man a ship and your task is to hire a crew and search for Great Whites to monitor. You can see your friends’ ships if your know their screen names. Here’s the cool part: the sharks in this game are controlled by real Great Whites off the coast of California! They have RFID tags in their fins to track their movements.

Right now, I am studying Lucy (pictured), a 4.3 meter female with a short temper. She’s already attacked one of my crew members who was hospitalized. Big fun.