Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign organization reportedly has taken over a MySpace page independently created by supporter Joe Anthony in 2004, and has refused to pay for the time and effort he invested in attracting 160,000 "friends" to the senator's cause.
A virtual equivalent of fisticuffs has broken out online, and no, it is not between warring camps of "American Idol" fans or bloggers with too much time on their hands. Rather, the dispute is between a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and a once-ardent supporter.
While much of the argument falls into "he said, he said" territory, this much is clear: Joe Anthony, a Los Angeles paralegal, set up an unofficial MySpace Latest News about MySpace page for Senator Barack Obama at myspace.com/barackobama, after he heard his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, and then invested time and energy into its development.
The Obama campaign got in touch with Anthony once his site -- which was rapidly attracting tens of thousands of MySpace "friends" -- appeared on its radar. For a while, a synergy apparently existed between the two.
Then the Obama campaign asked to take over the page, and the relationship quickly turned ugly. Anthony requested financial reimbursement for the time he had put into building the site, but the campaign reportedly refused to pay up. It then approached MySpace to obtain control of the site.
As Anthony says in his own blog posting on the matter: "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."
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