Yeah, our campaign is Internet-savvy. Sort of.
Long and technical story short, Sen. John McCain's presidential-campaign page at the online community MySpace was pulling in copies of a photo from a different server, which it shouldn't have been doing because that was incurring additional expenses from the guy, Mike Davidson, whose account it was. (His version of the story is here.) What McCain's online folks should have done instead was "locally host" the photo -- that is, download a copy, which Mike apparently wouldn't have minded, and posted it on their own server so that their own Web pages could include the photo without drawing from anyone else's Web resources.
Mike decided that if they were going to do that, he was going to replace the photo being pulled with one the senator perhaps wouldn't enjoy being associated with as much.
Meanwhile, as of 10:51 a.m. today, that photo is gone, but an editorial cartoon and an uncomplimentary (and NSFW) excerpt from the cartoon strip "Get Your War On" remain on the site.
I guess the candidates and their online folks still have a bit to learn. The Edwards campaign made what turned out to be a bad personnel choice in bloggers. The McCain campaign hired what turned out to be either inept or crooked Web designers.
The '08 presidential campaign was supposed to be the one where the 'Net and blogging firmly established themselves as campaign tools. And they might well turn out to be. But right now, the campaigns are still firmly stuck in 2005.
