Marathon Pundit: Obama gains MySpace site, but might lose a supporter

Last week the Barack Obama campaign snatched a pro-Obama MySpace site from its creator, Californian Joe Anthony.

In the aftermath, the Obama people look nasty, which is fair, because they've behaved in a nasty fashion in the MySpace episode.

From Lynn Sweet's Chicago Sun-Times column:

Joe Anthony, at the center of a raging debate over the role of netroots volunteers in Barack Obama's presidential bid, said Sunday his once ardent support for him is shaken as a result of the Obama campaign taking over the Obama MySpace page Anthony created.
"I am not as staunch a supporter like I was in the beginning," he told me.

Anthony is the 29-year-old Los Angeles paralegal who in November 2004 launched an Obama page on MySpace, the social networking site, attracting 160,000 "friends." Last Wednesday, the Obama campaign, wanting total control of the page, shut him down, replacing his content with official information from the campaign and leaving in the wake a dispute over whether Anthony was fairly treated.

A passionate discussion about the Anthony controversy on the official Obama campaign blog -- 400 comments Sunday as I write this -- is drawing more reaction than any other blog entry on www.barackobama.com, a sign that the episode touched a raw nerve in a campaign that is emphasizing new media and encouraging supporters to organize on their own.