I was reminded of this recently. Before I begin, keep in mind Amazon doesn't discourage personal blogs, and even has an official developer blog.

At one time, there was a blog created for recruiting. The information was accurate, and I wrote it. Some bloggers took note of this fun little project.

Shortly afterwards, a local paper picked up the story. They followed up two weeks later, after finding my friend Jim Carson's entry about the Amazon blog. Jim and I found it funny- especially because I was accused of not being 100% human. Jim wrote about it later, and so did Gretchen at Microsoft's jobs blog.

Some people suspect this was just a stunt- create a blog, kill it, free press. Definitely not true- it was a legitimate idea that we tried out, and it just didn't work (for a couple of reasons). We have performed little stunts in the past, but these weren't designed to catch the media's interest.

For instance, the Bezos Birthday page was accessible if you searched for "old fart" on Amazon. It was good-natured ribbing against Bezos, nothing more. It shouldn't surprise you that I was involved on that stunt, too.

I also find it interesting that two of my photographs are still on Amazon's techjobs page. (#1, #2)