My Dots for Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Republican Sen. John McCain Supports Gay Marriage

A staff member with Sen. John McCain’s presidential bid set up a McCain campaign website on Myspace. Big problem: they made unauthorized use of someone else’s website template.

The owner then changed the template on the website to read: “Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage.”

Payback!!

[tags: John McCain, presidential candidate, gay marriage, gay, Republicans, Myspace, Newsvine, media]

Photograph of The Day: Bead House

New Orleans: Bead House in The French Quarter.

[tags: blogs]

 

 

YouTube Inaugurates First YTAwards

Closely following this year’s venerable Academy Awards ceremonies in Hollywood, YouTube has debuted its own version of the Oscars, with its on-line video awards competition. Drawing from its vast online vault of millions of viral videos, YouTube has proclaimed the 2006 YTAward winners.

This posting presents an article about the YouTube awards and announces the winner in each of seven major categories. In addition, the seven winning videos are included for your viewing pleasure.

[tags: YouTube, YouTube awards, YouTube Award winners, videos, internet, technology]

Citizendium is Launched

Citizendium, a peer-reviewed progressive branch of Wikipedia, has been launched. The site was unveiled on Sunday, and as of yesterday afternoon it boasted publication of more than 1,100 articles. While this is a far cry from the more than 1.6 million entries in Wikipedia’s English version, it’s still a respectable start.

[tags: blogs, Citizendum, Wikipedia, encyclopedia, higher education, academic, technology, internet]

See the Rest of My Articles at Blue Dot

John McCain’s Campaign Website Proclaims Support for Gay Marriage!

NOT….

Michael Arrington, Editor of TechCrunch, published this report last night:

“Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today.  They used a well known template to create his Myspace page.  The template was designed by Newsvine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here).  Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit.  Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

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.

The changes on McCain’s campaign website were reversed quickly after they were discovered.”

McCain’s MySpace page has a very high profile.  Davidson seems to have been making a clear political statement, while also sending a message about respecting the property rights of others.  Davidson published this account of the event on Newsvine:

” If you visit John McCain’s MySpace page (as of 9am PST Tuesday morning), you will notice an interesting announcement from him.  He’s apparently reversed his position on gay marriage as well as revealed a bias towards attractive lesbians.  Why would a presidential candidate make such an important announcement on his MySpace page?  The answer?  He wouldn’t.  But I would.
You see, John McCain’s people commandeered my world-renowned MySpace design template and did a few things wrong:

1. They did not credit me for the template, even though the template explicitly requested credit.
2. They used my own unmodified imagery, specifically for the “Contacting John McCain” table.
3. As if #2 wasn’t bad enough, the McCain crew is actually pulling their image directly from my server on each page load.  So every time someone visits the McCain MySpace page, my bandwidth is being used to deliver part of the page!  Bad McCain!

So…

Numerous people have written me over the last few weeks to tell me that McCain has been using my code, but up until I realized he was pulling images from my server, I didn’t really care.  A lot of celebrities including Ryan “Van Wilder” Reynolds and the beautiful Nelly Furtado use my code and I’m totally cool with it.

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.

Luckily, I had already set up a special .htaccess rule on my server which served my real “contact me” image if the image was referenced from my own MySpace page, and served up a sample image if it was served from anywhere else.  This is the whole reason I even figured out what was going on.  I had my real image in cache and upon loading McCain’s page, the real image showed up (including my special note that said “NO REQUESTS FOR DESIGN HELP PLEASE”).  Thinking it was weird that McCain would get any requests for design help, I immediately realized what happened.

So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain’s page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server.  No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken.  The immaculate hack.

Abortion?  The Iraq War?  Probably too heavy to joke about.  Gay marriage seemed like a more of a non-lethal subject to center the prank around.

So with a few minutes in Photoshop and a quick FTP, a new John McCain was born…

…and The Straight-Talk Express isn’t just for straight people anymore.”