WASHINGTON -- Here's an inviting and cautionary note from an old-media geezer to the new-school bloggers, Webheads and YouTubers: Welcome. You're a valuable addition to the presidential landscape. Just don't get too full of yourselves.
I am moved to inject this little dose of realism into all of the hoopla that has followed the unmasking of the man who created and placed the hilarious "Big Sister" ad that lampoons Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on YouTube.
Drawing more than 2 million hits in its first days, the spoof re-edits Apple's classic "Big Brother" Super Bowl TV ad to portray the New York Democrat as an Orwellian talking-head image on a huge screen that is shattered by a feisty young woman with an iPod in her ears. The ad closes with the Web address of rival Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
The Obama campaign denied having any association with the ad, but it indirectly did. Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post political blog, put what she described as a team of 30 Web staffers to work. They found that the ad's creator was Philip de Vellis, a Democratic Web tech wizard who worked at Blue State Digital, a Washington-based Internet firm whose founders include Joe Rospars, who oversees the Obama Web site. That's embarrassing for Mr. Obama, who has presented himself as above mudslinging, low-blow politics. But a candidate can't be held responsible for actions by all of his supporters.
And, in the Internet age, the actions of supporters and detractors are greatly magnified, as Mr. De Vellis knows. He was quickly fired from Blue State Digital, according to his boss, although he says that he quit, in an online essay that Ms. Huffington invited him to write. But the rising Web-based movement that he represents goes on, he writes.
"This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last," he writes. "The game has changed." Well, yes - but not by all that much.
The promise of YouTube, the most popular of the sites that enable users to post videos, is in its slogan, "Broadcast Yourself." But what do you really get, YouTubers? Merely access to compete as just one more voice among the multitudes trying to grab a piece of viewers' time.
Go to YouTube and you'll join millions of users, but you'll also find a gazillion choices, most of which seem to be teenagers pantomiming tunes in front of their bedroom computers.
