Friday, June 27, 2008

Life Imitating Doonesbury

Life imitating the comics. Yes, it happens. Take the recent Doonesbury plot line for example. Episodes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily comic strip recently have featured young Alex Doonesbury, a student at MIT, doing a blog-watch and rapid response for the Obama campaign. Her job is to search the net for bogus blog posts and suspicious web sites, then intervene to expose them for what they are and spread the word. Awesome job, BTW. So you think that's a little far-fetched? Of course you don't, because you're informed and web-savvy. In reality, scurrilous hate-filled postings are already easy to find. Just check out the local politics discussion forums on Craig's List in your own hometown to confirm that.

Today, I came across a great bit of investigative journalism on the "Undercover Black Man" blog. The author of the post I read had noticed a suspicious-looking web site purporting to be a black-power site for Obama. It was filled with some pretty inflammatory crap, then dressed-up to look as real as the owner could manage - considering he's a long-haired, middle-aged white guy from Laguna Niguel, California. UBM "outed" the dude and his charade, and the site was promptly pulled with a contrite apology. Seems the guy is a bass player and teacher with more than a few vids on YouTube, so he's got his own franchise to protect. Welcome to on-line reputation management. Read about it here. You'll enjoy the bit of investigative journalism, proving once again that the blogosphere is rapidly supplanting the MSM as "the source" of up-to-the-minute news and analysis. Props to UBM. The Author suggests a celebratory victory dance is in order.

1 comment:

Undercover Black Man said...

Thanks for the linkage and the props!