Daily Digest: 5/8/07
By Joshua Levy, 05/08/2007 - 11:00am

The Web on the Candidates

  • Joe Anthony, the creator of an unofficial MySpace Barack Obama profile who had a well-documented brush-up with the Obama campaign over control of the profile, has decided to take down his old unofficial profile. This morning he wrote on his blog, "I've had some time to relax and think about what's next, and decided it's best to delete this profile and start anew. Regardless of the outcome, we accomplished a lot here on Myspace. We built the biggest profile, the biggest community of supporters, for any candidate on Myspace and I think we all did an amazing job. We did this together, before the campaign or Myspace even got involved... I'm going to stay positive and look forward to the next opportunity, whether it includes Myspace or not. I hope I'll meet some of you along the way." It's still up this morning but will apparently be deleted sometime today.
  • Scott Keyes at Political Insider does a quick roundup of the candidates' Facebook profiles, offering one factoid per candidate. Examples: Hillary Clinton is "the only candidate in either party to not list his or her relationship status. Everyone else listed 'married.'" Joe Biden "lists his political views as 'liberal' and is the only candidate to do so." Dennis Kucinich is "in a Facebook group called 'Free Hugs.'" Mitt Romney said that "Battlefield Earth was his favorite novel, [but] it isn't listed among favorite books; the classic American novel Huckleberry Finn is listed instead." And Sam Brownback also likes his science fiction: he "lists The Lord of the Rings before The Bible in his list of favorite books." (thanks Colin!)
  • The Bivings Report is running poll asking "whether political candidates should maintain official MySpace presences or let supporters lead the way." After 39 votes (not quite scientific!) the results are basically split down the middle. Forty-nine percent think the campaigns should run their own profiles; 51% think supporters should. There are clearly pluses and minuses to both approaches, as we've seen with Obama's MySpace debacle, and E.M. Zanotti says it all with the headline, "Right, Because If Anyone Knows Online Communities, Its Forty-five Year Old Senators."
  • Despite his lackluster official web presence, Ron Paul is everywhere on Digg. This largely owes to Paul's libertarian politics and the anti-establishment sensibility of Digg, whose users are clearly responding to Paul's criticisms of the war in Iraq and government spending and intrusion. After ABC briefly left Paul out of an online poll asking viewers of the Republican debate to rate who "came out on top" (he was added after supporters protested). Paul is a good case study of how the web can sweep up a candidate and make him their own, with or without his help.

The Candidates on the Web

  • Nikolas Sarkozy was elected the new president of France on Sunday, so conventional wisdom would have it that world leaders would publicly congratulate him via a press conference on television, right? Not anymore. Tony Blair's congratulations (in French, by the way) came via YouTube. It's easier, cheaper, and reaches more people than a televised press conference, so why not?

Mirror of Joe Anthony's Blog Post

Once Joe Anthony's Obama MySpace site is deleted, his blog post (mentioned above) will no longer be accessible. Here is a mirror of it available here.

Joe's Motives: REVEALED!

He was in it for the money from the get-go!

Notice that Joe refused to acknowledge the ridiculous nature of his demand for $39,000 for a MERE myspace page!

Notice that Joe ADMITTED that he was in it for the money and considered it "work."

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Joe
Date: Jun 4, 2007 10:27 AM

Then quit emailing me. Go bark at fire trucks or something.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Boone Webb Fan
Date: Jun 4, 2007 8:20 AM

Work?

You were VOLUNTEERING.

Or do you want to ADMIT that you were just in it for the money from the get-go?

$39,000 for a MYSPACE page!?!? If your motives were as pure as you claim, you wouldn't be seeking that insane amount of money for a (keyword) MYSPACE page!

Cyber-squatting is the term which comes to mind. You got all those "friends" (including me) because they believed that they were being friends with the Barack campaign, NOT because they were being friends with some schmo who wants to exploit the Barack campaign. NO WHERE on the page did you say "this is Joe's page." In fact, the page LOOKED and APPEARED to be the official campaign presence on myspace! If it had appeared to be what you now claim it to be, I wouldn't have joined you!

Get over yourself already.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Joe
Date: Jun 4, 2007 9:58 AM

Good morning to you too.

right, $39,000 for 2.5 years work. outrageous.

Chris Hughes was paid $13,000 in the first quarter alone for something I had already accomplished on my own. Maybe that explains why he wanted to take the credit for it.

Come back and talk to me when someone tries to steal your work.

Peace,

-Joe

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Boone Webb Fan
Date: Jun 4, 2007 7:54 AM

You have no credibility. You are patently anti-Barack.

$35,000 for a MYSPACE Page?!?!?!? Are you insane? And this "Do the right thin Barack" BS is just futhur evidence of your attempts to extort money from the campaign. If this was really about you volunteering to help Barack, you'd have never sought such an unreasonable sum of money. If you had half a leg to stand on, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Jacob

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Joe
Date: May 7, 2007 8:40 PM

That's not true.

I don't post comments that offend me, sure. This is my personal page.

Also not true about the money. I told techpresident, the first and only media source to have all the details.

I have nothing to hide.

----------------- Original Message -----------------
From: Boone Webb Fan
Date: May 7, 2007 5:47 PM

When you only post comments which border on glorifying you. I find it funny that you never mentioned the amount, until that phone call leaked. Allow some posts which question whether or not 39 THOUSAND dollars is reasonable, or make it readilly obvious that you're just a scam.

MySpace isn't work, it's a hobby. To expect a middle-class annual salary for a MySpace page is bordering on fraudulent.

I challenge you to provide one verifiable example of a MySpace page selling for $39 THOUSAND!!! And you have the gall to call it "nominal!"

Either allow dissenting point of view through, or lose all credibility. I'll make friends with yours to get the dissenting point of view across if you don't.

Good Work, JKillian. It's

Good Work, JKillian.

It's pretty obvious that this guy wasn't in it authentically to help Obama.

He's a schmuck. And I'd have been pissed to know that some of my campaign donations were spent on placating some nobody myspace fanboy to the tune of $39k. Thank god the campaign knew better.

This guy acts like he created something novel. He acts like he had 160k friends because of how awesome his page was or how good his marketing of it was. All he did was add friends. That's it. They were drawn to the site because of how inspiring Obama is. I'd be surprised if 1% even knew who the hell "Joe Anthony" was.



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