Boeing Offers Citizen Journalists a Free Ride

Dan Gillmor of Bayosphere reports that they've gotten an invitation from Boeing's PR firm "for one of our citizen journalists to interview an executive from Connexion by Boeing" the in-flight Internet service Boeing is offering to its airline customers. The person who does this would also get to go for a ride on a flight originating at and returning to San Francisco airport on Wednesday, July 27.

Smart PR move. But Bayosphere must have been on the "B" list.

Molly Holzschlag reports that, last night, she and a group of "journalists including some high-profile bloggers, newspaper writers (Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and Seattle Times), magazine and media reps (Macworld, Microsoft), radio personalities and podcasters get on a private jet from Boeing and have fun while blogging, podcasting and Flickr’ing from the sky." The group included Anil Dash, Steve Broback, Buzz Bruggeman, DL Byron, Bryan Corliss, Kevin Ebi, Dominic Gates, Brian Gregory, Cathy Lu, Larry Hryb, Mike Outmesguine, Chris Pirillo, Eric Rice, Robert Scoble, Bob Sullivan, and Nick Wingfield.

blogging_and_moblogging, PR

BL - wow, long time no see.

Actually, the event is today and we haven't taken off just yet. A few folks have dropped out so far as we know Anil Dash and Mike Outmesguine won't be joining us.

It should be quite fun!

Just to clarify, I was invited but did not attend.

I was there, we had a brilliant time. The Boeing Connexion system worked perfectly. I can easily imagine that it is going to change how business is done forever, and that people will begin to pick flights based upon WiFi on the plane.

Agreed. The airline that offers the best Wifi package gets my business. Plain and simple. I adore the productivity gain and the goof-off factor. And let's be honest, would we really feel guilty about blowing 4 hours in IRC on a plane? I know I wouldn't. :-)

Agreed. I just heard that Phil Torrone, MAKE zine, attempted to bring the system down with no success. I think that two reporters had problems, but that was with their laptop settings and not the system. If your laptop uses a VPN and that automatically boots up, it's problematic. Other than that, rock and roll.

This sure goes to show that PR, done intelligently, still works.

Don't know if there's an A or B list, but I think it's just that the plane can't be in two places at once. As far as I can tell, they're doing the first session in Seattle, and the second round in San Francisco.