This weeks Economist features our very own Scobleizer, can one of my illustrious British readers please interpret the bold phrases.
“Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and people at other companies are taking note.
...This caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism”. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well”. But Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade”. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly. He realised that Microsoft, the target of similarly irrational fears, should have its own version of channel nine, and that public blogging by insiders should be an important part of it.
Mr Pryor figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So he hired him“.
All of us know that Robert was working at Microsoft before channel9, so why didn't The Economist get that right?