Does it really matter if they find the right candidate through Monster.com, on SL or while they're shopping at Costco?

Nope, not at all. The reason why I am slightly offended is that people are treating "virtual interviews" with the same seriousness as traditional, face-to-face interviews. There will be no substitute for real human, spoken, face-to-face interviews; more to take out of a person like body language and emotion. Human collaboration within a close environment is crucial to most aspects of business and production. It is nothing more than silly for an individual to feel accomplishment from a job interview via SecondLife; feeling successful, bypassing face-to-face interaction. Though, I feel this position might seem too harsh.

Where does it treat them with the same seriousness?

To me the initial SL component was just a screening / outreach process - finding them someone they wouldn't have otherwise found.

He then had 11 face-to-face interviews (in two different countries) totalling 9.5 hours of face-to-face time..

How was this "bypassing face-to-face interaction"?

What does a virtual job fair have to do with integrity? It let an HR person from Seattle interview someone in Italy for a job in Luxembourg...

To me it seems like Amazon being smart.

Regarding your edit, I don't think you understand how important technical evangelists are at places like Amazon, Microsoft, Sun, etc... They are essentially technical sales-people; they're the ones who say "Hey, this is what we're working on, and this is why it's important".

To be completely honest with you, your post seems like sour grapes.

Interest is a two way street. It's on the job candidate to be qualified for the job they apply for and to not waste the companies time if they're not interested.

On the flip side, companies need to be respectful of a candidate's time and make a move if interested or let them know early on if they're not so the prospect can move on.

I work for Sun. I had one interview, WITH my manager. She made the call, I got the job. I think AWS is a great service offering but it sounds like they may need to fine tune their hiring pipeline a bit.

I do a lot of, for lack of a better term, "geeky" things, but I would never write about anything involving Second Life. Perhaps it's unfair discrimination and perhaps I am just ignorant to SL's real worth/usefulness, but... I can live with that.

I disagree with you on your edit, however; "evangelists" can be very important to an organization.