The Stratius Blog

Over the last few days, news that VoteForTheMilf.com pointed to the McCain campaign website (and a video greeting from Sarah Palin) has traversed the social web pretty quickly. After first being discovered by GovGap.com many top Twitter and Digg users began to heavily promote it, right or wrong. Some social networks limit the voting up of clearly partisan political content, like on Youtube, but on Twitter and Digg there are no such limits. And stories based loosely in fact, unfortuneatly can sometimes quickly gain buzz.

I think the reasoned observer would have figured out pretty quickly that this was a prank on the McCain Campaign. Whether you find it funny or not, I would wager that most of the folks perpetuating the story that the McCain Campaign owned the domain were probably Obama supporters. Just a guess.

The truth that it was a prank has come out of course. It was accomplished because of some technical loop holes allowing for someone to easily remap the domain (not just redirect) to the McCain website IP address (boring tech info, I know). I imagine legal action would have eventually forced the prankster to fess up if he was not smart enough to come clean on his own.

What’s the lesson here? Beyond ensuring high profile websites have more security, this is a lesson on the openness of the web. Through no fault of your own, your brand can come under attach online pretty easily, and there are not always safeguards. The McCain campaign handled the issue pretty well. They simply told the facts as they knew them and discussed the issue no further.

Nice WSJ article on it here

This campaign is creating all kinds of internet firsts. I expect many more to come.