Well I would think somebody on the staff of Presidential hopeful John McCain’s is going to lose their job today. So what happened? Well somebody on his Web team used a well known template to create McCain's Myspace page. The template was designed by Mike Davidson. Davidson, a well known blogger and the founder of Newsvine (a neat site BTW), gives anybody permission to use the template if they credit him.
But it went well beyond that, so Davidson had a little fun with them. Read on.
McCain’s staff used his Myspace template but didn’t give Davidson credit. Ok, that is no/no, but even Mike (here) said that wasn't that big of a deal.
What upset him was McCain was pulling images directly from Davidson's server. So Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:
Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage...particularly marriage between two passionate females.
I think Davidson sums it up best here:
But then I read the article in today's Newsweek about how politicians are all setting up MySpace pages in order to "connect" with younger audiences. McCain's MySpace page is listed, as are the pages from several other candidates. I think the idea of politicians setting up MySpace pages and pretending to actually use them is a bit disingenuous, so I figured it was time to play a little prank on Johnny Mac.
To carry on this thought further, this was just wrong on McCain's staff. They were stealing Davidson's IP and his bandwidth. If McCain wants to look like he understand the MySpace or social networking crowd, his staff really need to retake Webmaster 101.
And finally, I don't think this is a big deal, but I do find it pretty darn funny.