"ParkRidge47" not so grassroots after all

There has been much hype over the last few weeks surrounding the now-infamous attack ad against Hillary Clinton posted on YouTube by "ParkRidge47," the name being a sly reference to the Chicago suburb where Clinton grew up and the year of her birth, 1947.




The ad was a repurposing of Apple's famous 1984 ad that used George Orwell's "1984" images of Big Brother as a slam against IBM. Only now, Hillary is Big Brother. The post became the latest YouTube sensation, getting over 1.5 million views.

Despite the fact that the ad ends with a plug for Barack Obama's Web site, Obama's camp denied any involvement, as did all the other campaigns.

Thus, it was initially hailed as a milestone in grassroots campaigning, an ardent concerned voter taking their voice to the Internet in a novel and unprecedented way.

Naturally, newspapers in both print and online proceeded to wildly speculate as to who "ParkRidge47" really was. Some thought that it might be the same hard-right wingers who concocted the Swiftboat ads in 2004, in an attempt to take down both Clinton and Obama, who had vowed to run a clean campaign.

Some thought it might have been liberal blogger Arianna Huffington or one of her cohorts at The Huffington Post. In response, Huffington sought to clear her name by assembling a team of 30 or so techies to track down the true publisher.

Alas, it turned out to be a campaign professional after all - Philip de Vellis, who worked for Blue State Digital, a firm that's been retained by the Obama campaign. But it appears that de Vellis did this entirely on his own in his spare time, without the knowledge of Blue State or the Obama camp.

Nonetheless, de Vellis was immediately fired by Blue State Digital when the company became aware of his actions. And this wasn't the first time de Vellis was suspected of making an unauthorized video. The same thing happened last year with Sherrod Brown's (successful)Senate campaign, but de Vellis denied any involvement.

That Senate campaign was low-key enough that they gave up on the investigation, but a presidential campaign is relentless and no-holds-barred.

Regardless of whether de Vellis' actions were rogue or authorized, it has undoubtedly tainted Obama's campaign - probably the first of many more hits the campaign will take in the coming months.

It should also serve as a warning to anyone posting controversial content on the Internet who has delusions of anonymity.

This guy was a seasoned veteran of political campaigns and a professional technophile, who obviously knows how to cover his tracks far better than the average citizen. But he still got tracked down eventually, proving nothing is untraceable if the investigating party wants to get at you bad enough.

YouTube's Woes Worsen

At this point, we've pretty much all heard about the $1 billion lawsuit Viacom has launched against YouTube over alleged copyright infringements. But that is just one component of an assault from several media fronts.

In addition to that, two movie studios, Twentieth Century Fox, and more recently, Magnolia Pictures, have subpoenaed YouTube's parent company Google to identify users who posted pirated content from their studios. Fox went after YouTube back in January for illegal uploads of "24" and "The Simpsons."

NBC Universal also sent a six-page letter to YouTube expressing its disgruntlement over bootleg videos being uploaded to the site. NBC Universal played a large part in making YouTube so popular, with the now-famous "Lazy Sunday," and even more legendary "Dick in a Box," which has now been viewed over 18,000, 000 times.

YouTube's current policy towards piracy is that they will take unauthorized material down - if and when they are notified, and once they are able to locate all of said material.

Most media companies think that this policy is crap - and they're right. They shouldn't have to go through the process of legally notifying YouTube every time one of YouTube's users acts irresponsibly. What happened to the idea of "responsible host?" If someone behaves poorly in your house, you should be the one to deal with them. Other companies shouldn't have to log onto YouTube and waste countless man-hours scouring for pirated content.

YouTube needs to set up filters that can immediately detect pirated video and, ideally, prevent the offending party from being able to upload it in the first place. Or at the very least they need to be more proactive about policing themselves.

These media companies incur huge expenses in developing their movies and shows, and they're entitled to reap the full benefit of the revenues, since they are obviously the ones who put all the effort into creating the content in the first place.

These lawsuits and subpoenas by the media companies are probably designed mostly to get YouTube and its parent company to start taking these copyright issues more seriously and take action immediately. Many of these companies would probably like to make deals with Google and YouTube at some point, because the site provides valuable exposure - it's just a matter of money.

Google is obviously not going to take this lying down. Few people think that Google will actually end up paying $1 billion to Viacom. This will likely just be Viacom's way of lighting a fire under Google's ass to work out a distribution deal that both companies can live with.

It is probably a smart move on Viacom's part to nip this in the bud - because the longer it allows this behavior to carry on, the harder it will be to undo it.

Is MySpace a Presidential Prognosticator?

I read an interesting article this afternoon in Newsweek about the Web Site techPresident.com, which follows the online campaign strategies of prospective candidates. Along with its blogs and links to official campaign and party Web sites, the site includes a constantly-updated tally of how many friends each candidate has on his or her MySpace account.

Not surprisingly, Barack Obama is far and away the most popular, with (as of this posting) 53,206 friends - more than all the other candidates - Democrat and Republican - combined. Hillary Clinton is a distant second with 26, 087, and John Edwards third with 12, 338.

What is surprising is the Republican candidate with the most MySpace friends (drumroll).......Ron Paul. Yeah, I know - who the hell is Ron Paul? He's a 71-year-old GOP congressman and physician from Texas who formed a presidential exploratory committee on Jan. 11.

Paul's got a libertarian ideology (he had actually joined the Libertarian Party in 1987), is against most increases in taxes or government spending and promotes a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Paul has so far garnered 3, 165 friends, far less than his Democrat opponents, but far more than the closest GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, with only 1807 friends.

Whether any of these numbers amount to a hill of beans is rather dubious, given the extreme fickleness of the (mostly) youthful MySpace users, and the obvious fact that people can set up as many accounts as they want.

It's just interesting that this random guy pops out of the wild blue yonder, ahead of the presumed GOP front runners Rudy Giuliani (who currently has a measly 863 friends) and John McCain (the only GOP candidate who has lost friends since last week - a stunning 84.7 percent since the previous week - he's now down to 211).

Giuliani and McCain might believe that social networking sites are mostly a waste of time in their case (which may very well be true), since their potential backers tend to be older, more affluent (and reliable) than those who vote Democrat.

So I wouldn't expect them to bother mounting any attack ads against Ron Paul in the near future.