257 W - + 3 - 7 MySpace, Fox, and Politics
A potentially freaky story:
MySpace launched a U.S. presidential campaign site Monday, and it has the potential of reaching millions of people who don't otherwise go to political Web sites, one analyst said.
MySpace, a division of Fox Interactive Media Inc., launched MySpace Impact, featuring MySpace pages for 2008 presidential candidates.
Candidates with pages on MySpace Monday were Democratic Senators Hillary Clinton of New York; Barack Obama of Illinois; Joe Biden of Delaware; and Dennis Kucinich of Ohio; John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator and 2004 vice presidential candidate, along with Republicans Senator John McCain of Arizona; former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Libertarian Ron Paul also has a page.
MySpace hopes to play a "powerful role" in the 2008 elections, CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a statement. The site plans to give users easy-to-use information in a format they can relate to, he said.
MySpace, with 64.4 million unique visitors from the U.S. in February, has the potential to play a major role, said Andrew Lipsman, a senior analyst at ComScore Networks, a Web traffic measurement firm. MySpace users represented about 37 percent of all U.S. Internet users, he said.
As the article notes in passing, MySpace is a division of Fox, and so I wouldn't be surprised if the "millions of people reached" by this campaign get a "fair and balanced" slant. Hopefully most of them will be intelligent enough to realize that they need to look beyond a profile page to get actual information.