In an age of rising fuel prices, and having recently flown on a Northwest flight where snacks could be purchased for $5, rather than being included in the price of the flight, it occured to me that the airline could still provide snacks, and do so at almost no cost.

The way to do this would be to use the flight as a targeted sample for snack products. By providing free snacks on an otherwise snack-less flight the snack company gets exclusive access to a specific passenger feedback either by completing cards before exiting the aircraft or by going online post-flight and completing a survey for a chance to win a prize. On an even more recent flight with Porter Airlines, Terra Chips were offered as a snack option, and I upon landing tried three different grocery stores before finally securing a bag. They were that good. What do you think? Is in-flight try-vertising a viable solution for airlines intent on cutting costs? Let me know in the comments.

As a somewhat related aside, here’s a clip from Mad TV on budget airlines…

I was just having another look at the now infamous Does What happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook presentation and it got me thinking about online privacy and what a paradox it is. Anything online is easily reproduced and propagated by virtue of the internet being digital and omnipresent in nature. It is therefore a medium which is fundamentally at odds with the idea of privacy because the preservation of privacy requires the existence of informational silos which limit said information from spreading too far.

The idea that the real world concept of these “contextual silos” which prevent information from spreading very far beyond it’s original context could be transferable to the web is flawed because digital information is ubiquitous. Anything on the web can potentially be seen by anyone, anywhere at anytime, whereas in real life a night of say, alcohol fueled revelry, would only be witnessed by people present at the event and would be known to only so many people outside those that were present. Furthermore, the internet is a repository of digital memories as opposed to human memories and so not only is nothing ever Read more »