Techcrunch has the story of the hacking of John McCain's MySpace page by a designer unhappy with the way McCain's campaign used a MySpace template he designed.  Here's the scoop from Techcrunch:

Someone on Presidential hopeful John McCain’s staff is going to be in trouble today. They used a well known template to create his Myspace page. The template was designed by NewsVine Founder and CEO Mike Davidson (original template is here). Davidson gave the template code away to anyone who wanted to use it, but asked that he be given credit when it was used, and told users to host their own image files.

McCain’s staff used his template, but didn’t give Davidson credit. Worse, he says, they use images that are on his server, meaning he has to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.

Davidson decided to play a small prank on the campaign this morning as retribution. Since he’s in control of some of the images on the site, he replaced one that shows contact information with a statement:

"Today I announce that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage…particularly marriage between two passionate females."

As of this writing the prank message is still up.

This is another example of the point I made in my last post: if campaigns are going to play in these social communities they need to understand the rules and respect the culture.

Update: Here is a link to a screenshot of the defaced McCain MySpace page.  It has been fixed.

Update 2: David All points out a post by the designer who performed the mischief. 

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