Suitably Flip

Audacity

Presidential candidates from both parties have been falling all over themselves to one up each other in their collective scramble into the web's newest-fangled arenas.  Web videos, online chats, social networking sites, and the political blogosphere have made for active early battlegrounds, already accounting for a number of dust-ups and semi-scandals.

Taking the social networking craze to the next level Barack Obama's site actually hosts its own network, My.BarackObama.com.  Doing social networking right could well help to cement Obama's branding on the left as the choice of the web generation.  Instead, due to a highly unfortunate bug (actually, less of a "bug" per se than an oversight and an misoverestimation of the civilities of the site's users), the forum became an unwitting hate speech distributor.

When a user attempts to use the "find a group" feature, he encounters a dialog box that offers an example of how to phrase the query.  The example given was, er... unsavory.  Quite unsavory.

The problem appears to have been that the example was auto-generated based on the most recently formed group, but the names of the groups were not being screened.  They are now.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch brought the embarrassing oversight to the site administrators' attention, soliciting an ungracious reaction.

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Audacity

Presidential candidates from both parties have been falling all over themselves to one up each other in their collective scramble into the web's newest-fangled arenas.  Web videos, online chats, social networking sites, and the political blogosphere have made for active early battlegrounds, already accounting for a number of dust-ups and semi-scandals.

Taking the social networking craze to the next level Barack Obama's site actually hosts its own network, My.BarackObama.com.  Doing social networking right could well help to cement Obama's branding on the left as the choice of the web generation.  Instead, due to a highly unfortunate bug (actually, less of a "bug" per se than an oversight and an misoverestimation of the civilities of the site's users), the forum became an unwitting hate speech distributor.

When a user attempts to use the "find a group" feature, he encounters a dialog box that offers an example of how to phrase the query.  The example given was, er... unsavory.  Quite unsavory.

The problem appears to have been that the example was auto-generated based on the most recently formed group, but the names of the groups were not being screened.  They are now.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch brought the embarrassing oversight to the site administrators' attention, soliciting an ungracious reaction.