It’s interesting that the CTO of Amazon, Werner Vogels, includes the following disclaimer in the footer of his personal blog:

This is a personal weblog. That means that the opinions voiced here are purely personal and they do not in any way represent the opinions, experiences or directions of my employer Amazon.com. If you take any of the statements on this weblog and use it as an official statement by Amazon.com you are knowingly misleading your audience. For official statements by Amazon.com visit the Amazon.com Virtual Media Room.

If I do write something worth referencing, and you feel strongly about the need to reference my affiliation, you should also mention in your reference that this is my personal weblog: “Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, mentions on his personal weblog that the Seahawks have a good shot at the Superbowl this year”.

If you can not play by these simple rules, please do not reference this weblog at all.

First, I have to point out a classic example of the arrogance of the A-list blogger. As a species, they tend to enjoy making demands on their readers. It’s not far out to imagine a blogger wanting to quote something Vogels has said about Amazon on his blog as the next move for Amazon technology as a company. Under this disclaimer, Vogels insists you go away and ignore whenever his “personal blog” interects with his job as CTO of Amazon.

Second, the idea that a CTO of Amazon can even have a personal blog is ludicrous. Take a look at the last five posts he’s written: “Amazon in Scotland,” “OOTO August 2006,” “Life is not a State-Machine,” “Amazon 2 Second Life,” and “Facts & Sources.” Of those, two are explicitly about moves Amazon is making into technology, two are irrelevant, and one outlines research methods in technology. So, Vogels seems to write half-and-half about his personal life and the company.

I can take strategic planning information from one of his posts, and fairly attribute it to Amazon proper. For example, in Amazon in Scotland, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels wrote: “At Amazon however the small, agile team concept (2 pizza teams), which is the organizational structure that maps onto the strict service oriented nature of the Amazon technology platform, makes that teams are [...] successfully developing.” This isn’t a personal snippet from Vogel’s life–it’s a statement about the kind of organizational structure that Amazon believes in.

So why the false disclaimer? At the CTO level, there is no distinction between firm life and personal life.