This morning’s Observer column…

There was an interesting spat recently at Amazon HQ in Seattle that has been reverberating around cyberspace ever since. What happened was this: the authors of a fast-selling new book advocating business blogging were invited to give a talk to a lunch-time meeting of Amazon employees. Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer of Amazon, asked some direct – some say rude – questions, demanding empirical evidence that business blogging was a good investment rather than just a cool idea.

The visitors appeared to be miffed by his iconoclastic, sceptical tone. Up to that point on their book-promotion travels they had been listened to in reverential silence. So the meeting ended on a sour note and the participants went their separate ways – but the argument continued in, well, blogs…