Joe Rospars of Obama's campaign has a post at MyDD about My Space.

[madfloridian]

I have no opinion on this subject at all, but I thought it was interesting for Joe to come out and post this at Kos and MyDD. Joe was with the Dean campaign, was at DFA, and went along to the DNC with him. I heard he had gone with Obama.

It is an interesting post about the Anthony situation at My Space.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/5/2/191954/1220

"Hi, I'm Joe Rospars and I'm the New Media Director at Barack Obama's campaign. There have been a lot of questions and comments in this community related to our MySpace profile, and so I wanted to come by and clarify how we got here and answer questions.

Our campaign started quickly. People around here say that this has been like building an airplane in mid-air, having already taken off. This is especially true of the New Media operation. While the campaign in general is going from zero to sixty, our team is at the same time charged with exploring the new ways we can build relationships between Barack and his supporters, and foster relationships among supporters themselves."

Here's one of Joe's posts from 2005 at the blog.

http://www.blogforamerica.com/view/5029

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Let's cut to the chase:

Obama's campaign screwed the pooch on this one.

[Colobo]

2. How did he?

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Some guy setup a MySpace page a year ago.

About Obama. Got a huge list of friends. Obama's people wanted to buy the page and the list from him. He said $39,000, which, I might add, is chump change for what he had and for websites of any ilk in a presidential campaign. Obama's people did not like the figure, went to MySpace, got the guy thrown off and took over.

I have no issues with Obama's campaign, per se, but this was really, really terrible and hamfisted.

[saracat]

4. I agree.Absolutely hamfisted and stupid!

[madfloridian]

5. My feelings.

"We knew Joe had a full-time job already, and, early on, we floated the idea of moving to Chicago to work for us full-time (potential staffers were moving to Chicago and join the team at that time, and there were openings). I totally agree when Chris Bowers says that the New Media/online outreach efforts of campaigns should be a priority -- and we have built an operation here in Chicago and in the early states that reflects that posture.

But Joe seemed to prefer to volunteer part-time from the outside with the campaign to continue building the community. He said he was honored to help out, and we were honored to work with him. We worked through the complications that arose: letting Joe know that he shouldn't work on the site from work, educated him about the rules governing campaign promotion of official Senate material, etc. Joe was right with us, and things continued down the path towards making this unofficial community into an official space run with help from volunteers.

...."Unfortunately, at that point, Joe changed the password on the profile, and didn't give us the new one, like he had done in the past. This changed the previous dynamic, and we could no longer access the profile at a moment's notice if need be. We asked Joe what was needed to restore access, and subsequently we received the list of itemized financial requests that have been discussed elsewhere.
This made us uncomfortable. Every day, MySpace was driving tens of thousands of people to the page on the premise that this was more or less our "official" presence -- yet we had no access to the content on the page, and no ability to be responsive to the thousands of messages coming in from supporters seeking information or action from the campaign.

...."And so it became clear that we needed to have MySpace point people at something we had at least basic access to -- immediately. In MySpace, politicians, musicians, and other public figures have the right to their own name (www.myspace.com/barackobama, www.myspace.com/hillaryclinton, etc.), and so we asked MySpace for use of that URL and to ensure that any promotion of "official" profiles for candidates be directed to the new profile our team created.

The community of the 160,000 still exists, and we've made sure that MySpace will let Joe have access to the community he helped build. And we hope we can continue to work with him to make that as effective as it can be."

I am still fairly neutral on this, but it does sound like the campaign did try to reach an agreement. Legally they had to have access, if he were working from work on the site...things had to be legal.

I guess I just instinctly know Joe Rospars would be fair, but I don't know the others behind it.