• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, May 3, 2007 11 AM

The Barack Obama campaign this week seized a MySpace page belonging to an Obama supporter it was aligned with previously. Joe Anthony, a Los Angeles paralegal, created the MySpace profile for Barack Obama three years ago. The profile brought in some 160,000 friends for the Illinois Senator that were approved by Anthony to visit and post comments.

Eventually, Anthony gave the Obama campaign access to update the page, but little by little, the campaign tried to exercise more control. Soon, negotiations broke down, and Anthony changed the site's password, requesting $39,000 for the page, as well as compensation for his time. Meanwhile, a quick complaint to MySpace from the Obama camp resulted in Anthony's account being frozen, and the name being handed over to the campaign. (The page had only 20,000 friends last night.) Anthony detailed the fallout on his personal MySpace page.

In many ways, the 2008 Presidential hopefuls are Web 2.0's guinea pigs. They come from an era of publicity control, and as much as they want to engage the public, they haven't learned how to balance the resulting criticism. In this case, the Obama camp learned the hard way not to cross its supporters, because they,too, can spin the public.

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