François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

Boeing's VP of Marketing, Randy Baseler, has a "web journal". Nice, except... it has no permalinks, no RSS feed, no comments -- I can't even find an email address for emailing the guy, who's asking questions such as "So how do you want to fly?" but can't be bothered to listen to the "flying public" -- and the style is, sorry to say, corporate marketing speech where the airlines world is painted in black and white. ("Do you want hubs with that A380?") Currently all posts I see are meant to paint Airbus in a corner just when they released what looks like the replacement of the 747.

Nice try, awful execution. Get a crash course on blogs Randy, or yours isn't going to fly!

[Update July 18, 2005] Since my original post, Randy Baseler's Journal has seen the addition of RSS and Atom feeds, as well as comments. However the comments are not treated as they should be. Firstly they are apparently still moderated a priori -- the real guys who don't fear the public conversation do it a posteriori ;-) (to be fair, it's their decision, but one can compare the degree of openness in this exercise). Secondly they are relegated to the right-hand side navigation box, so you can't really get a grasp of the conversation that's going on since they are completely out of the context of a post. To fix this, the comments should be listed below the post where they were made (that is a fairly common and expected design on blogs). Still no TrackBacks, but in the past six months I've been convinced that those are too much a burden on bloggers because of spammers and the lack of efficient TrackBack-spam filtering in most blogging tools. It also seems to me that the writing is getting slightly more engaged, though it still sometimes reads like corporate sanitized communication.