Obama's MySpace rift - its a loss for eveyone involved. What a shame.

[MazeRat7]

I agree that none of the parties involved, Joe Anthony, Obama's staff, and MySpace are completely faultless. But I'm going to have to side with Joe Anthony here. He did a tremendous amount of work for the campaign and deserves "some" compensation for his efforts if they wanted to take control of his project. Granted, I think his price tag was a wee bit high.. but maybe not. I charge $100/hr for the same kind of work and have no way of knowing how many hours he actually spent.

On the other hand, the purist meaning of "volunteer" is to expect no compensation unless offered. Which in this case it was.

I do have problems with him creating a page using some one else's name rather than his own - even though there were disclaimers clearing indicating this was not an "official" page. Still...MySpace should not have just taken the URL and given it to Obama's campaign.

I'm sorry this whole mess has blown up and shown just how controlling even the most "populists" of candidates are about their "message".

I think everyone has lost on this one.

MZr7

In November 2004, Joe Anthony, a paralegal living in Los Angeles, started a unofficial fan page for then-newly-elected Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) on MySpace.com. Inspired by Obama's keynote address at that summer's Democratic convention, Anthony had never been politically active before. "I was just blown away," he told me. He put time into the site every day, answering emails from people wanting to "friend" the page, pointing them to voter registration information, and, once Obama threw his hat into the ring, telling them where to find out more detailed positions taken by the candidate.

By the time of Obama's official campaign announcement in late January, Anthony's Obama profile--which had the valuable url of myspace.com/barackobama--already had more than 30,000 friends, well more than the other contenders. Over the following weeks, it continued to grow at a rapid pace, generating lots of headlines about Obama winning the "MySpace primary." Yesterday, the profile had just over 160,000 friends. Today, that url has only about 12,000. And it's under new ownership. Joe Anthony, one of the super volunteers of the Connected Age, has lost control of the page he started to the professionals on Obama's staff.

http://www.techpresident.com/node/301

[Radical Activist]

1. Obama has a right to his own name.

No one is entitled to demand a job with a campaign. If anything, the Obama campaign was foolish to think that anyone but the campaign should ever have had control of the site.

[Bake]

5. He's a public figure, so no, he doesn't have exclusive rights

And to just TAKE it - the web site, that is - is pretty shitty, if you ask me.

Bake

[saracat]

2. Another reason I can't jump on the Obama bandwagon.

This is typical of campaign nastiness and the lack of appreciation of volunteer effort. I thought the Obama Campaign would be different.$39,000 id beer change to them.Those kids are paid a fortune, but they don't want Anthony to have compensation? I hope Obama steps up to the plate with this.

[Dawgs]

3. Have we heard anything from the Obama campaign?

Right now it seems all one sided.

This is what happens when you get greedy. I'm sorry. He volunteered his time, never expecting any compensation, then cries about it when his greed burned him.

I agree that everyone loses here, but let's wait before we take the side of this one guy.

[saracat]

9. Greed? Do you know what those kind of people who do this work for

campaigns are paid? Those campaign workers wanted to money siphoned to themselves is all. This is NOT a lot of money! The campaign is raising tons.

[Radical Activist]

10. They don't get paid much.

Most people who work for campaigns could be making far more doing the same thing in the private sector. There's no reason to insult their motives or discount the fact that they believe in something enough to take an unstable campaign job that could end at any time for less money than they could make elsewhere.

[saracat]

12. No so. I was advised that the salaries of campaign workers should be a minimum

of $5000 a month and include insurance by the DNC. We hasve an exec Director who was paid $95,000 a year and was jus a kid .Our pol Dir got $85, 000. The kids that went door to door got $2000 a month plus per diem and lodging. That is not beer money to most Americans. ( DNC figures from the 2004 campaign)I won't even go into what the web designers and PR people who don't just work campaigns and are in the private sector get.

[Radical Activist]

14. So which is it?

$5,000 a month or $2,000? You're contradicting yourself. I've worked many campaigns and you don't know what you're talking about.

[saracat]

15. I am NOT cotradicting myself! I differentiated between regular campaign workers and

the canvassers is all. And I have been campaign manager to several campaigns ,including a congressional race. I do know about the salaries.

[Connie_Corleone]

7. Why should any campaign pay for a webpage that's free in the first place?

[cooolandrew]

4. You do have to be wary of a lot of stories, with the spin machine in rinse cycle.

[Connie_Corleone]

6. MySpace is FREE.

If he was building his own website, paying for hosting and bandwith, I could understand wanting to be compensated. But, since it's a free site, the Obama campaign doesn't have to pay him because there are no rights to his free page.

You don't get compensated as a volunteer.

[Bake]

8. Just because it's a free site doesn't mean there's no intellectual property

Did Obama take only the URL, or is he going to continue to use the page itself?

If the latter, then Obama's just as big a prick as most other politicians, and that's too bad. I thought he MIGHT have been better than that.

Bake

[Blue-Jay]

11. I like Obama more because he's NOT on MySpace.

Apparently, he's not promoting his shitty garage band, and isn't a friend-whore.

[BlooInBloo]

13. Without taking sides morally, it's indisputable that *tactically* this is stupid of Obama....

... The goodwill of the internets WAS one of Obama's ace-in-the-holes against Clinton. Actions on Obama's part that tend to erode that advantage is stupid.

[Blue-Jay]

16. Horse hockey.

The day MySpace affects an election is the day that I give up on politics for good.

[madfloridian]

17. Here.

"The community of the 160,000 still exists, and we've made sure that MySpace will let Joe have access to the community he helped build. And we hope we can continue to work with him to make that as effective as it can be"

http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/5/2/191954/1220