Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 30
Sign: Aries
City: K-town, Los Angeles
State: California
Country: US
Signup Date:
02/16/07
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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Saturday, May 05, 2007
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My comments on the campaign's official blog
Friends,
I'm continuing to receive a steady stream of emails from you all, and the vast majority are supportive. However, there are a few that haven't heard the whole story and unfortunately are jumping to conclusions.
I keep getting requests from the media asking me to clarify certain contradictions in the campaign's official blog on my.barackobama.com, so I'm just going to go ahead and comment on it here.
At this point, what's done is done, and the only point of this is to learn from the mistakes made in this situation, and move on to more positive things.
Below is a copy of Joe Rospars' blog from my.barackobama.com, along with my comments in bold where key facts were either left out, or are simply misleading.
-Joe Anthony
NOTE: I have discussed this with Rospars, and although he didn't disagree, he refused to make any changes.
By Joe Rospars - May 2nd, 2007 at 7:11 pm EDT
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/rospars
There have been a lot of questions and comments in this community related to our MySpace profile, and so I wanted to come by and clarify how we got here and answer questions.
Our campaign started quickly. People around here say that this has been like building an airplane in mid-air, having already taken off. This is especially true of the New Media operation. While the campaign in general is going from zero to sixty, our team is at the same time charged with exploring the new ways we can build relationships between Barack and his supporters, and foster relationships among supporters themselves.
When it came to MySpace, we decided to take a leap. We decided to make the attempt to combine the organic support and community-building of a grassroots effort with the official campaign outreach efforts.
In many ways this mirrors what has happened on the campaign's own web site. On February 10th, the day Barack announced his candidacy in Springfield, we launched My.BarackObama.com has an unprecedented public utility for supporters.
Even on the campaign's own web site, the organizing efforts and community-building by the grassroots has outpaced the growth of the traditional campaign infrastructure. On the site, over 11,500 people have created their own blogs about everything from their issue priorities to their personal experience campaigning locally. Thousands of events have been planned using the events tool (social events, planning meetings, small fundraisers), and tens of thousands of people have RSVPed to these grassroots-driven gatherings.
And over 5,000 grassroots volunteer groups have been founded -- in many states, these groups will be the only organizational presence the campaign has. Even in the early states, staff organizers are hitting ground in places where volunteer groups have already been meeting and organizing. One of the first orders of business for new staff on the ground is getting to know the grassroots who have already started building the movement.
When it comes to MySpace, I'm not sure if a campaign of this size has ever teamed-up with a grassroots volunteer on this scale, but we wanted to give it a try.
Joe Anthony's great work was building community at the www.myspace.com/barackobama address, and so we contacted him.
At that point, the profile had about 40,000 friends, and to our delight, Joe agreed to work with us. Indeed, he seemed relieved to have some help -- he gave us the password, and we began to exchange content, work together, and continue growing this community from the ground-up. We created images that he (and others online) could post, and began going through the process of preparing the profile to be "official" by combing through the content and establishing a plan to ensure that everyone who tried to contact the campaign through the profile received an answer. (People wrote messages and comments in huge numbers, virtually all addressed to Barack or the campaign -- "Will you come speak at my graduation?", "Where do you stand on issue X?", "How can I help locally?", etc.)
Comments on the page were addressed to Barack Obama, because this was a profile in support of Obama, as were many other Obama fan-sites on Myspace. However, I kept a presence as the "moderator" and manager of this profile to avoid this confusion, and most people understood that. As new friends joined the community, some would send emails asking "Is this really you Obama", but most quickly caught on. At all times, there was a disclaimer on the page which read "This profile is not managed or endorsed by Senator Barack Obama".
The vast majority of all emails were addressed to me, Joe, as the moderator (ex. "Dear Joe, when is Obama coming to Iowa?") and I would refer them to the official website, www.barackobama.com if that info. wasn't already posted on the profile. This was always a community for Obama supporters, by an Obama supporter. I do not believe any person on that friends list, that participated in the community, would say otherwise.
In addition, the campaign really has no way of knowing what the messages said, because they only had access to the page for a very short time. With that in mind, I don't understand why they claim this in their blog.
We started talking to Joe about formalizing the arrangement, preserving his work building the community, and talking through how to preserve his involvement in the direction and development of the profile.
For a time, both the campaign and Joe had mutual access. Soon after, MySpace launched a promotional campaign to direct traffic to the official candidate pages. The campaign allowed MySpace to promote this unofficial profile because, strictly speaking, there was no official presence. And so MySpace began featuring the profile in candidate promotions -- and the friends and workload grew.
We knew Joe had a full-time job already, and, early on, we floated the idea of moving to Chicago to work for us full-time (potential staffers were moving to Chicago and join the team at that time, and there were openings). I totally agree when Chris Bowers says that the New Media/online outreach efforts of campaigns should be a priority -- and we have built an operation here in Chicago and in the early states that reflects that posture.
Chris Hughes did indicate that there were "limited staff positions available in Chicago and I could send them my resume". At this point, although I would've loved to work directly for the campaign, I was happy to continue working on the profile as I had been, and it was more of a priority to maintain my involvement in the page and not let it become like one of the other Candidates profiles. I never sent them a resume, and instead focused on building the page and finding new ways to engage the community.
There was something special happening in this Myspace community, and I did not want to see it turn into a passive source of information run by the campaign. They already had an official website (www.barackobama.com) for that, which I directed a great deal of traffic to.
But Joe seemed to prefer to volunteer part-time from the outside with the campaign to continue building the community. He said he was honored to help out, and we were honored to work with him. We worked through the complications that arose: letting Joe know that he shouldn't work on the site from work, educated him about the rules governing campaign promotion of official Senate material, etc. Joe was right with us, and things continued down the path towards making this unofficial community into an official space run with help from volunteers.
This is true, and I was honored to work with the campaign. There was some question about making this unofficial page an official one. I suggested at one point keeping it an unofficial page endorsed by the campaign and linking to it via the campaign's official website. This was a difficult and complicated situation, and I thought carefully about what would be best for the campaign and community.
As we progressed, we began to work-up paperwork that would codify this arrangement -- ensuring that the campaign would have full access (what if someone put up an obscene comment during the day while Joe was at work?), and assuming the liability burden (legally, ethically, and politically) for what happened on the site.
This is about the time I began to restrict access to the profile, and stopped providing the password to the campaign. I agreed that we should have some agreement before moving forward, and money was not an issue at this point. This was a liability issue if this were to be an official profile, not a money issue.
Further, after a closer examination of the Myspace terms of use at that time, I learned that Myspace prohibits allowing access to any user other than the creator of the page. For this reason, and for security purposes mentioned above, I decided I should cease from allowing the campaign access to the profile until we had a formal agreement (and Myspace's consent).
I did however continue to work with the campaign, and implemented every one of their suggestions for the profile. Although they did not have access to the profile for that period, they would call or email me and I would make any changes, post a bulletin or blog, or whatever they asked me to do, all on very short notice.
At the same time, though, the community had skyrocketed. Nobody expected the grassroots to respond this campaign in such large numbers the way they have, and the rapid growth of the MySpace profile once the MySpace Impact Channel began promoting the various candidates is yet another example of the appeal of Barack. We were well over 100,000 friends, and the burden of administering such a profile became immense.
Unfortunately, at that point, Joe changed the password on the profile, and didn't give us the new one, like he had done in the past. This changed the previous dynamic, and we could no longer access the profile at a moment's notice if need be. We asked Joe what was needed to restore access, and subsequently we received the list of itemized financial requests that have been discussed elsewhere.
This is misleading, and why some have gone as far to accuse me of attempting to extort the campaign.
See my previous comment. This not why I stopped providing the password. The itemized financial requests will be discussed further below.
This made us uncomfortable. Every day, MySpace was driving tens of thousands of people to the page on the premise that this was more or less our "official" presence -- yet we had no access to the content on the page, and no ability to be responsive to the thousands of messages coming in from supporters seeking information or action from the campaign.
They did have access to the page, through me. As I mentioned, once the campaign became involved in March of 2007, I implemented any and all of the campaign's suggestions, even though they did not have direct access to the profile. I cooperated with them until the very end.
Also, at all times, an 'away message' was set on the page so that users would be encouraged to contact the campaign directly via their official website. In that away message users were referred to the official site for answers to their questions not included on the Myspace profile. For suggestions regarding the Myspace profile specifically I included my email address associated with the page. I received many emails over the years, and responded to all of them, redirected them to the appropriate source, and signed off as "Joe, moderator". This was an effective system and I implemented many user suggestions, whether it be a new photo, new video, a bulletin about an event I should post, etc.
I also received hundreds, maybe even thousands of emails over the years from people thanking me for working so hard on the page. Many indicated that they didn't know much about Barack Obama prior to joining my fan-site.
We talked to Joe and made clear that we truly wanted to incorporate the community into the campaign's official presence, but that if these financial demands were a precursor to the campaign having access at all, that we would need to start with an official profile separately and have MySpace promote that instead.
This is also misleading, because it leaves something out.
Chris Hughes, in a telephone conversation, indicated that the campaign would prefer to acquire full access to the profile. They did not want an outsider managing an "official" profile, and I understood that. Chris Hughes then suggested that they could offer some type of one-time fee to transfer the profile over to the campaign. I asked him if they had any suggestion or any offer at that time, and he asked me to just think about it and we would speak the following morning. We both agreed that this fee would be largely symbolic, as it was impossible to calculate all of the time I put into it over the past couple of years.
That night, at his request, I did prepare a propsal and emailed it to Chris. I had never prepared such a proposal, and it was on very short notice, but I did the best I could. I thought about it for about 5 hours. I went for a long walk around my neighborhood and thought about what would be fair to all involved. I didn't like the idea of the campaign taking over a Myspace profile which had been a netroots phenomenon before the campaign or Myspace even got involved.
Regardless of my personal convictions, I wanted what was best for the campaign, and obviously Barack Obama, and I trusted that they knew what they were doing. For two and half years I worked very hard without ever expecting to be paid, but if they wanted to take control of this profile and take direct advantage of the community I helped to build, I thought it was fair to be paid. I even specified at that time that the fee was small enough to be cost-effective to the campaign, but large enough to be sure they were taking this community seriously. If they didn't like it, they could've easilly started and built their own Myspace profile and I would've put a link to it on mine. This appears to be what Hillary Clinton did, and it seemed to work out well.
And so it became clear that we needed to have MySpace point people at something we had at least basic access to -- immediately. In MySpace, politicians, musicians, and other public figures have the right to their own name (www.myspace.com/barackobama, www.myspace.com/hillaryclinton, etc.), and so we asked MySpace for use of that URL and to ensure that any promotion of "official" profiles for candidates be directed to the new profile our team created.
At any time, they could've asked for the URL and that wouldn't have been a problem. The campaign wanted the entire community I built and that was always clear.
After receiving my proposal, and a few postponed meetings, I was contacted by Josh Orton from the campaign. He indicated that he was "flabbergasted" by my proposal and that they did not have any budget for it. He accused me of using the profile for commercial purposes and made no counter-offer. I do not understand why Chris Hughes suggested this one-time fee, if later they had no budget for it and essentially accused me of trying to cash in.
At that time he asserted that I had two options: I could turn the profile over to the campaign, or it would be deleted immediately. I indicated that I would not turn it over to them, and it would be enormously offensive to me, and to all 160,000 members of the community to delete it after all of our hard work.
This conversation was followed up by two emails from Chris Hughes, indicating that they were sorry that I decided to "kill" this profile, and that Myspace needed my consent to transfer the profile over to them.
I responded to each email, indicating that "killing" the profile was not my decision and I would not be held responsible for it. In addition, Myspace did not have my consent to transfer the profile to anyone.
I also wrote that whatever their decision was, I would continue working on the profile until it was deleted.
Shortly afterwards, the profile was not deleted. Instead, Myspace and the campaign took control of the profile, deleted the content, and put a link to the new "official" profile. They used a community that took two and half years to build to quickly gain new 'friends' on their own page. (I'll also mention that I immediately received several emails complaining about how lame the new page is, specifically that it didn't load properly in some browsers).
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.
Myspace returned the blank profile with 160,000 friends (and quickly dropping) to me after I contacted techpresident.com and the news quickly spread throughout the Media. The campaign takes credit for this in Rospars' blog, but it was Myspace that contacted me and agreed to do this. In fact, Liba Rubenstein from Myspace indicated that the campaign would've preferred that the profile be transferred over to them without my consent, but Myspace would not allow that to happen.
The page was "taken" on Monday, and finally "returned" to me on Thursday evening. In my opinion, if I hadn't complained, my profile would've probably been transferred to them, and none of you would ever know that I had anything to do with building it.
I do not blame Myspace for any of this. It is their social-networking site. I do not blame Barack Obama himself either. However, I supported his campaign and helped out by rallying tens of thousands of supporters on Myspace and it worked exceptionally well. For Obama's campaign to try to take this profile, and later even write a blog that subtly accuses me of extortion, is the biggest slap in the face I've ever felt.
Returning a blank profile to me after the fact doesn't mend the situation. An apology just wouldn't mean much either.
At the end of the day, this is all new for everyone -- this Joe, that Joe, and everyone participating or commenting on it. We're flying by the seat of our pants, and establishing new ways of doing things every day. We're going to try new things, and sometimes it's going to work, and sometimes it's not going to work. That's the cost and that's the risk of experimenting. Joe launched this profile for all the right reasons, and for a while grew it with us.
But the ultimate purpose is building a community around the idea that ordinary people can come together and affect change in this country. Barack Obama is the candidate I believe can transform the process and make that change happen.
And, to the extent that more and more people every day come to that same conclusion, my bet is that both profiles will continue to grow.
Well, I'm offended by this rationalization, and it contradicts this entire blog. If it was acceptable for me to operate a Barack Obama fan-site on Myspace with 160,000 users, Joe Rospars' blog wouldn't exist, and none of this would've ever happened.
Barack Obama inspired me to create this profile, but the end result left me jaded enough to never publically support any candidate again.
I'm not asking for anything from Barack Obama or his campaign, but people need to know what happened here.
This profile was a place for "ordinary people to come together and affect change in this country". I worked so hard to build it because I believed in Barack Obama and wanted change as much as everyone on the profile did. Regardless of the campaign's intentions, the campaign quashed not only my right to have this profile, but the very hope that inspired me to build it.
It's a long time until the primaries, and there's a good chance I may get past this and still vote for Barack Obama. However, this should be a valuable lesson that campaigns should pay closer attention to what's really happening on the internet. We're not a list of names, and we're not inexpensive advertising. We are exactly the ordinary people you speak of, using the internet to attempt to change the world.
Sincerely,
-Joe Anthony
7:35 PM
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135 Comments - 199 Kudos
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Thursday, May 03, 2007
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(Audio) Interview with Conway and Whitman on 97.1
Hey guys,
Here's the interview with Conway and Whitman on 97.1 last night:
Click here to listen
Also, I've emailed the campaign and we both agree that we want a positive outcome. Their official blog about this situation contains some inaccuracies and I've confronted them about this. I hope they'll come around.
-Joe
UPDATE: They never came around. : /
1:24 AM
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14 Comments - 21 Kudos
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The old profile is back in my control.
Myspace has returned access to the profile to me.
This doesn't make up for what happened, and I'm unsure of how I'll proceed from here with this blank profile of 150,000 people. I hope you'll all help me decide.
At this point, maybe it would be best to delete it and move on.
1:32 AM
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85 Comments - 99 Kudos
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Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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Thank you all.
I received hundreds and hundreds of of emails and comments today from around the country and even around the world.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate you all reaching out and standing up for me like this. This is amazing. You guys rock.
I'm exhausted. It's been a long day and time to get some sleep, but I encourage you all to continue this discussion here. Together we can work towards a positive outcome to this for all, including the campaign. I'll approve all comments from all viewpoints, but please be courteous. I'll delete anything offensive.
I spoke briefly with the campaign earlier today and encouraged them to consider this situation carefully, and that I think they should apologize. If not to me, at least to the Myspace community.
They've blogged about it on the official site, and although I don't agree with everything they said. I do think they want to work things out.
I'm looking forward to moving on from this.
Thank you all.
-Joe
11:28 PM
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12 Comments - 10 Kudos
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TC from Barack Obama (!!!)
I just received a phone call from Barack Obama himself.
He expressed his appreciation and we agreed that there is something to be learned by everyone involved at this point. (Frankly, I was a little surprised by the call, and was too nervous to remember any exact quotes)
I assured him that this is just a horrible thing that happened and obviously he wasn't responsible and shouldn't be held responsible. It's his campaign that perhaps mismanaged this whole thing. He of course stands by his campaign, but again. . . much to be learned by all.
I'm sure he has mixed feelings in speaking with me about this, but it was nice of him to call.
I guess I have mixed feelings as well, but it was still a great honor.
I urge you all to consider this situation carefully. It'll take time for me to work this out and decide if I will personally continue to support Obama, regardless of how I feel about his campaign's handling of this situation.
It's not right what they did to me and this profile, but it's also wrong to let this change your views of Barack Obama as a candidate.
After all it was Obama that inspired me to do all this.
What a day. I'll keep you posted. . . .
3:36 PM
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203 Comments - 82 Kudos
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05.02.07
Myspace hasn't returned the old page to me yet. I emailed to follow up, no response yet.
I'm still not sure what I should do with it. I think I'll post these blogs there, and ask the community to help decide a positive way to make use of the page.
Now I must decide if I should go into work and try not to think about this, or attempt to take a vacation day and defend myself on the iNtErnEtz all day. Not much sleep last night, and didn't eat dinner, so I should probably stay home and relax.
Thank you all for your emails and comments. Your support is helping me get through this, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate it.
Update: 12.17pm The profile still hasn't been "returned" to me. Still waiting on this. . . Better news, it appears that almost everyone, and especially the Myspace community and others involved in the netroots movement, are all reaching out to me to show their support. This is awesome. I'm more confident than ever that I did the right thing in taking a stand on this. Thank you.
8:00 AM
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16 Comments - 16 Kudos
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Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace (Please read this article on Techpresident.com)
Please read this article by Micah Sifry at techpresident.com. This is a thorough, and fair representation of what happened with the Obama unofficial Myspace profile that I created, and the events that occurred throughout the past few months.
To Barack Obama and Obama for America: "Big Payday"? If you had been paying any attention at all to this community in the past two and a half years you would know that money has nothing to do with this. You just kicked 160,000 of your strongest supporters right off of your own lawn.
Read this article at techpresident.com
The Battle to Control Obama's Myspace
By Micah L. Sifry, 05/01/2007 - 11:15pm
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.
How all this happened is a complicated tale that is still unfolding, and none of the parties involved--Anthony, the Obama online team, and the MySpace political operation--emerge from this story unscathed. Speaking on background, Obama campaign staffers are spreading word that Anthony just wanted a "big payday." Anthony in turn has posted a missive on his blog (that was originally sent to me as an email) accusing the Obama team of "bullying...[and] rotten and dishonest" behavior. However one parses those accusations (more below), the Obama campaign's reputation as the most net-savvy of 2008 has taken a big hit. And MySpace executives have been forced to take extraordinary action to resolve a dispute between two high-profile users of their invaluable site, one a passionate volunteer with a huge network of friends and the other a frontrunning presidential candidate who has helped make MySpace a new factor in the 2008 contest.
The Barocket Takes Off
At first, all was rosy between Anthony and the Obama campaign. Chris Hughes, one of the campaign's first internet staffers (and a co-founder of Facebook.com), emailed Anthony through the MySpace page and both sides were pleased to connect with each other. For several weeks, they collaborated on a daily basis, with the Obama campaign offering advice to Anthony on how to improve the site, sharing content with him, helping him place a fundraising widget on the site, etc. He in turn gave the campaign password access to the profile in case they wanted to tweak it quickly, but they made little use of it and relied mainly on Anthony to maintain the site.
It was a labor of love for him. Here at TechPresident, we started getting emails from Anthony every now and then, making sure our own tracking of Obama's MySpace friends was up-to-date, and pointing us to his progress elsewhere in the campaign. "I'm working on [the site] in the mornings, lunch breaks, and for a couple of hours every night," he wrote me on March 1st. "Nearly 10,000 friend requests this past week, and all are unsolicited!" he added "This profile has evolved into quite a large community and I'm glad that it seems to be mobilizing people."
But sometime in the middle of March things began to go awry. On March 17, MySpace announced the creation of the "Impact Channel," which aimed to focused attention on the presidential race, and the Obama campaign had them use Anthony's Obama profile as the site the Impact Channel pointed to. As you can see from TechPresident's tracking page, Obama started gaining friends on MySpace at a much faster pace, hitting 80,000 a few days later. Anthony's workload began to grow. A few weeks later, when Obama's picture was featured on MySpace's "Cool New People" box on its home page (Hillary Clinton is there now), everything exploded. Obama's friend total barocketed from 100,000 to 140,000 in a week. Meanwhile, Chris Hughes had handed the MySpace portfolio to a new campaign hire, Scott Goodstein, who came to Chicago with tons of experience running social network-focused efforts for an impressive array of progressive groups and causes.
It's around this point that the informal working relationship between Anthony and the Obama campaign went sour. The exact chronology of events is in dispute but the general trajectory is clear. As his volunteer workload grew to all hours, Anthony decided to email the Obama campaign asking to be paid in some way for his time. This set off discussions within the campaign about what to do, and ultimately they decided they had to control the page. Unfortunately for all concerned, the negotiations on how to do that were a disaster. Anthony says:
For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn't have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it.
The last few weeks were just insane. They kept scheduling phone conferences with me, I would wake up early that day after barely sleeping the night before, I'd take time off work, etc. and each after another would be postponed at the last minute. This went on for weeks.
It got to the point where I didn't feel comfortable turning the profile over to the campaign unless they paid for it. This was largely symbolic. The same campaign that inspired me to work so hard to build this community, the same campaign whose underlying message stresses "the power of the individual to have an impact on politics", was constantly downplaying my role in this, bullying me, and a couple of other things that were just rotten and dishonest (specifically in connection with Myspace, and the campaign quashing a recent NPR interview about the profile).
Crash and Burn
Obama insiders see things very differently. They agree that at first all was copacetic, and that Anthony was only helping the Obama campaign with his site. But as attention grew to MySpace, they started to worry about a potential train wreck. A Newsweek story noting that Anthony had some minor facts wrong about Obama's biography made them nervous. And while he complied with every request they made about content on the site--keeping a prominent disclaimer stating that it was an unofficial page, removing a link to Obama's Senate podcasts because it might be an FEC violation, culling a "friend" from a Larry Flynt profile page--they chafed nonetheless.
Coordination with a volunteer they had never met, who lived far from campaign HQ, and who controlled an asset of increasing value to their effort, was just not as seamless as they would like. Who knows who he is actually emailing, they worried. How do we know if the answers he is giving people are the right ones? Welcome to the age of voter-generated media, where a super-volunteer using popular online tools and sites can become as important as big donor or a top campaign surrogate.
Anthony's request to be compensated for all the work he was putting into Obama's Myspace page--anywhere from five to ten hours a day--was the final straw, apparently. After kicking around various ideas including hiring him or making him a consultant, the Obama people asked Anthony to propose a one-time consulting fee. In exchange he would give them control of the page, with credit for the work he had put into it.
"I went for a four mile walk to think about it," he told me, continuing:
I considered the time I had put into it from January 1st of this year, not counting the previous two years. It was about $39,000. Plus I asked that if any fees were to be paid to MySpace by the campaign up to that point in time, those should be shared with me, up to $10,000. There was no counter-offer. They said they didn't have any money.
Indeed, it appears the Obama internet team was shocked by the size of Anthony's proposal and argued to themselves that it was proof that he was just in it for the money, even though campaigns like theirs regularly give tens of thousands of dollars to highpriced media consultants who would give their eye-teeth to deliver 160,000 rabid activists to a campaign. Instead to them, Anthony's bid was all the more reason to get control of the site. Obama's staffers are now spreading the word that Anthony wanted a big payday, including a huge percentage of any ad buys on MySpace. I have a copy of Anthony's email proposal, however, and it contradicts that claim.
Of course, no one really knows how to value the creation of a popular political website with tens of thousands of members. Big sites like Flickr.com and Weblogs.com have earned their owners somewhere between $20 and $40 per member. Care2, the massive progressive email list vendor, charges about $1 per email address that they generate for a campaign. But it would be silly to suggest that Anthony generated 160,000 MySpace friends for Obama on his own--if he wasn't plugging a very charismatic candidate like Obama he'd never have grown such a large site.
Whatever the case, at this point it appears the Obama people simply decided that they would get control of the myspace.com/barackobama url by going around Anthony and getting MySpace to lock down his access to it. In their view, Anthony was violating MySpace's terms of service by falsely representing himself as Obama, and thus they didn't have to pay him anything. The worst that would happen, they reasoned, is that they would have to rebuild the candidate's network of friends.
And this is indeed what is happening now. At the request of the Obama campaign, the url myspace.com/barackobama has been taken away from Joe Anthony and put in their hands. Jen Psaki, the deputy press director for Obama, says:
There is an incredible amount of support for Obama's candidacy on MySpace and our goal is to ensure that we are being as responsive as possible to the community. Because MySpace and the community treated the work as official and due to sheer volume, our campaign staff wanted make sure users had direct access to the campaign. We support the MySpace communty, and look forward to building our relationship.
Was this action fair to Joe Anthony? MySpace itself has come up with a positively Solomonic solution to that question, promising to restore Anthony's network of 160,000 friends as soon as he picks a new url for whatever unofficial Obama fan page he may care to create. Says Jeff Berman, MySpace's senior vice president for public affairs and general manager of video:
We are firmly committed to empowering our users and protecting their rights. The situation with Senator Obama's profile became an unfortunate instance where a user gave a campaign functional control of a profile and the relationship between the two broke down. We felt under the circumstances that Senator Obama had the right to the URL containing his name and to the official campaign content that was provided, but that the user should retain the basic elements of the profile, including the friends who had been accumulated. Now that each Presidential candidate controls his/her own MySpace page, we don't expect this to be a problem again.
And indeed, for MySpace this probably will never be a problem again, for in the future it's likely that political campaigns will always make sure to build and maintain their own official presences there.
But this latest episode in the evolving interaction between voter-generated media and campaign-controlled content raises several unsettled issues:
*If it weren't for the hundreds of hours put into sites like MySpace by passionate volunteers like Joe Anthony, would the folks at MySpace even have anything like an Impact Channel? The only reason campaigns and advertisers are taking sites like MySpace seriously is because they have millions of users; shouldn't the volunteers who help draw the crowds to these new online town halls get some kind of compensation beyond a little modest recognition from political professionals now and then?
*Is it true that once a voter-generated site gets major traction, the campaign affected has to control it? Can a front-running presidential campaign--even one as devoted to empowering supporters to take their own initiatives and connect to each other through social network tools as the Obama campaign--afford a major site run by a campaign volunteer outside their control? Is such control even possible?
*Why couldn't the Obama people find the money to work out an amicable arrangement with Anthony? What are they spending the $26 million they raised last quarter on?
The most intriguing thing about this whole mess is this is the first time I can think of where the grass-roots activist at the bottom of the pile has a megaphone as big as the folks who tried to boss him around. Right now Joe Anthony is lying on his sofa, trying to gather his thoughts as he wonders what happens to all the sweat and passion he put into the last two and a half years for Barack Obama. As best as I can tell, he really doesn't know what he should do, because he's never been in these shoes, and he's as bewildered as anyone could be about how it all came crashing to the ground. But unlike every activist who's ever been crushed by events beyond his control, he can do something that just might give him a clue as to what comes next. He can ask his 160,000 friends for help.
10:44 PM
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5.01.07 What happened to the Obama profile?
Current mood:  disappointed
Friends,
Many of you are probably wondering what happened to the Obama profile. The campaign, with the help of Myspace, have seized control of the profile without my consent, and are using it to refer traffic to a new profile they created. I have been blocked from having access to the profile. The campaign will probably have a different perspective on the events leading up to this, but until my personal profile is deleted, I'm going to take a stand on this. I believe what they did is just wrong, and someone should say something.
Here is an email I sent to Micah at techpresident.com. Any questions, let me know:
Thanks Micah,
I want to be careful about this, but also I think it's unfair that they deleted this community when they could have left it up as an unofficial fan site as it has been for the last two and a half years. The campaign may say that this was my decision, and this is not true.
I did want to be paid, if we were to continue working together . This was not an attempt to use this profile for commercial purposes. This was an attempt to keep working my ass off on this profile, for Barack Obama, and for the enormous community of supporters on Myspace.
Since January, as you may know, and as many in the Myspace community know, I've been working on the page around the clock. I started this profile in November of 2004 and it grew steadily since then. In January and February the media started to notice, and I began to work even harder because I reallized what an impact the Myspace could really have.
People were actually registering to vote, making contributions, asking questions, putting banners on their pages, etc. I know this because I constantly received emails about this, and I replied to every single one to thank them or point them in the right direction if they needed more information.
The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest.
For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn't have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it.
The last few weeks were just insane. They kept scheduling phone conferences with me, I would wake up early that day after barely sleeping the night before, I'd take time off work, etc. and each after another would be postponed at the last minute. This went on for weeks.
It got to the point where I didn't feel comfortable turning the profile over to the campaign unless they paid for it. This was largely symbolic. The same campaign that inspired me to work so hard to build this community, the same campaign whose underlying message stresses "the power of the individual to have an impact on politics", was constantly downplaying my role in this, bullying me, and a couple of other things that were just rotten and dishonest (specifically in connection with Myspace, and the campaign quashing a recent NPR interview about the profile).
In a conversation with Chris from the campaign last week or the week before, Chris suggested a one-time fee to transfer over the profile to them and that they discussed this with Myspace and they were agreeable with any arrangement we could work out. He did not suggest how much, or what sort of a fee. He did say that he needed it by the next morning so we scheduled another meeting and I stayed up all night working on a proposal that I thought would be fair to everyone. This was a positive conversation and he seemed sincere enough.
That meeting finally happened yesterday. It was clear at that time that there was no "one-time fee". I felt like it was a bit of a setup so that they could have a reason to take the profile without my consent.
I was accused of using this profile for commercial purposes. I was threatened that I would be responsible if the profile was deleted (they even followed up via email to be sure I knew it was my fault!) The conversation really was about them taking control of the profile. There was no counter offer, or anything to suggest that they had any intention of paying me anything at all.
At this point there was no way I would turn this community over to them and would rather keep it as an unofficial site and keep doing what I've been doing. I expressed this, and they said that if I did not turn the profile over to them immediately, they would delete it and all of my hard work would go to waste. They reiterated this several times, and repeated "You are the one making the decision to kill this profile". In fact, I responded each time, that I have no plans to delete this profile, and that decision would be between them and Myspace. (I even added that he sounded like Bush telling congress/senate it was their decision not to fund the troops. How hypocritical is this!)
Finally, Chris from the campaign emailed me, indicating that Myspace needed my consent to give them access to the profile. I replied that Mypace did not have my consent to grant access to the profile to anyone.
An hour or so later, I was blocked from the profile and the content was altered to redirect traffic to the new, "Official" profile. Myspace has in fact granted access to the profile without my permission.
This was not about money and I don't believe that one person who has interacted with me via the Obama profile over the past couple of years would be able to say that my efforts were anything but sincere. This was about holding a campaign to their message, about acknowledging my work, and taking this community seriously.
I think I did the right thing. I wanted a fair outcome for everyone, but unfortunately that's not what happened. In fact, I think this was enormously offensive to both me and the Myspace community. I could understand Myspace/Newscorp doing this, but didn't think Obama's campaign could have the audacity to do such a thing.
Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you're just a liability.
This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.
Sincerely,
-Joe Anthony
p.s. Like I said, I'm passionate about this right now. All this work, all this progress is down the drain, and I'm absolutely heart-broken.
9:05 AM
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