Give Credit Where Credit Is Due – Or Get Hacked!
It appears that Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain’s MySpace page has been hacked. Apparently whoever set up the page page used a well known template designed by Newsvine but neglected to give any proper credit. Not only does the page fail to give credit for use of the template, some of the images are still hosted on the Newsvine server, meaning that they have to pay for the bandwidth used from page views on McCain’s site.
Therefore Mike Davidson, founder and CEO of Newsvine decided to play a prank. Seeing that he had control over some of the images, 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.
Here is a before and after shot:
The lesson learned here is to give proper credit where credit is due. That includes using people’s templates, graphics, referencing sources for stories and/or quotes and the list goes on. McCain’s situation was probably a mere oversight but produced an embarrassing result because if you know John, he does not support gay marriage.
You can check out the full story at Newsvine. Hat tip to TechCrunch.
About the Author: David Wallace, co-founder and CEO of SearchRank, is a recognized expert in the industry of search and social media marketing. Since 1997, David has been involved in developing successful search engine and social media marketing campaigns for large and small businesses.