By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, September 1, 2005; 10:47 AM

Thinking of running for office sometime in the next decade? In the next two decades? Register your Web addresses now.

That's the lesson that Virginia's lieutenant governor learned.

Timothy M. Kaine, who wants to succeed fellow Democrat Mark R. Warner as the Old Dominion's next governor, runs his campaign Web site at http://www.kaine2005.org/home.php. It's a self-explanatory title, but doesn't hold quite the simplicity of www.timkaine.com.

That address, unfortunately, is taken. It was registered by Matt Chancey, a self-described conservative Christian activist (he works for the Persecution Project Foundation ) and resident of Harrisonburg, Va. At the moment, entering "www.timkaine.com" redirects your browser to Kaine's lieutenant governor page , but Chancey could do with it whatever his heart desires.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. There are numerous examples during the past decade of Internet address speculators registering addresses of celebrities such as Madonna and Bruce Springsteen . The aim was to sell the addresses for a profit. Registration gets cheaper all the time, so getting the right address often meant the possibility of a big payoff.

Money isn't the name of the game here, however. Instead, political spinmeisters have discovered that owning the Web space of the people they think will be tomorrow's political elite can score points on the ideological chessboard.

"It's a no-brainer," said Jonah Seiger, a campaign consultant who specializes in online strategies. "As soon as a decision is made to consider seriously a run, and before you begin to talk to anybody outside of your immediate circle and family about doing it, you should go and register your names."

Seiger is one of my immediate go-to sources on the Internet and politics, and in this case he knows more than most.

"By not capturing obvious variations of a candidate's name, you leave the campaign and the candidate vulnerable to spoof sites, parodies and out-and-out attack sites," he said. "I've certainly bought all the variations of [a candidate's] name and also bought other people's names."

He declined to give examples, but said that even if you don't employ an opponent's name for an online attack, you can still make that address unavailable to the candidate, "mostly as an offensive holding-the-turf kind of play." One of the best examples of someone's name being used against them was the site www.gwbush.com/ , which last year ran a parody of the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign Web site that was nearly a perfect, if corrosive, facsimile. (GWbush.com -- founded by Zach Exley , a MoveOn.org co-founder and former staffer for John F. Kerry and Howard Dean -- is gone, though I can show you a White House parody that ought to keep you busy for a while.)

Nowadays, if you peruse the Whois service on the Network Solutions site, as well as those of other Internet address registrars, you can see many different Web addresses reflecting the names of various political figures who the experts think could be tomorrow's governors, senators, representatives and presidential candidates. So where were Kaine's people on the address question when they were mapping his political future?

Campaign spokeswoman Delacey Skinner said it was because many politicians and campaign professionals were still getting their feet wet online when the site was first registered.

According to Wild West Domains , a unit of Internet registrar GoDaddy.com (of Super Bowl wardrobe-malfunction commercial fame), www.timkaine.com first was registered in April 2001 when Kaine was running for lieutenant governor. It was subsequently renewed in April of this year.

"The guys we have doing the Internet stuff are pretty savvy and they know all this stuff," she said. Four years ago, on the other hand, it wasn't something they stopped to think about. "It was a down-ticket race. It's not like he had a huge staff or anything."

It's neither difficult nor expensive for even a modestly-funded campaign to register a few addresses. The problem is figuring out all the variations. Even if Kaine's people took timkaine.com, they would still need to think about all sorts of other "timkaine" options: timkaine.org, timkaine.net, and even country-code-specific names such as timkaine.tv. Add to that variations such as kaine2005.com (and .net, .org, etc.) and you're quickly into registering right and left.

Seiger pointed out that people tend to visit what they know, and for most casual Internet users, that means addresses ending in .com.

Chancey, who said he has been a supporter of Republican campaigns in Virginia for the past decade, doesn't plan to use timkaine.com against the Democrat's campaign. But what about the future?

"It's always good to be thinking ahead," said Chancey, who runs a blog at mattchancey.blogspot.com . He declined to comment specifically on what he might do with the site if Kaine were elected governor, but said that criticism is a possibility. "It's one way we can hold our elected officials accountable. ... When people want to get information about Tim Kaine, it's one place that they could get it."

Invitation au Voyage, Google Style

Liberation reports that Google plans to extend an official invitation to French publishers today to join the search engine company on its ambitious project to digitize the world's literature .

In a Q&A session with the publication, J.L. Needham -- the man the company dispatched to turn the country's favor toward working with Google -- said the search frim has been in discussions with French publishing houses large and small about plundering ... sorry, participating with them on digitizing their works. The big concern, he said, is that most publishers want to strike deals under French copyright law rather than the English-language global contract that Google has used in a dozen other countries. Needham also said the digitization project is taking place mostly at Google HQ in Mountain View, Calif., but that it is looking at establishing a department in France to handle this.

These are somewhat granular concerns compared to the Gallic gut-wrencher that Google created when it announced its Print project. Jean-Noel Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, warned that the American company's plan could threaten France's cultural heritage. The only solution, according to culture minister Renaud Donnadieu de Vabres, was to embark on a similar project, only based in Europe.

Plenty has changed in the meantime. Google has suspended its project in the United States for now, as it attempts to address copyright concerns among American publishers. The French-led project to digitize-its-own-works-thank-you-very-much, on the other hand, met for the second time yesterday, according to an article in Le Figaro .

Reporter Thiebault Dromard wrote that officials with the French project discussed pressing questions such as how to pay for it, what content to pick, the effects on private business and which search engine to use. (Hint: Ils vont choisir Google, sans doute ... tout le monde aime un peu d'ironie . Plug that into your Google translator.)

Pouring Water on This 'Looting' Thing

I was reading the Wonkette site Wednesday when I came across this item . If you don't feel like following the link, here's an explanation. The site shows a photo of a black man in New Orleans flood waters with an accompanying caption noting that he "looted" a store. Another photo of two white people notes that they were photographed after "finding bread and soda" in a store. Wonkette suggests that the Associated Press, which took the "looting" photo, apologize for a bias against African Americans. The Daily Kos notes : "It's not looting if you're white."

This has really taken off in the blogosphere as charges fly that the collective racism of the AP is coming to the fore. Yeah, the jig is up -- the caption writers at the AP are secret members of the Aryan Nation, every last one of them.

Let's take a little reality check here. First, the "finding bread and soda" caption is courtesy of Agence France-Presse, an entirely different news wire service than the AP, and Getty Images.

Second, the AP's director of media relations has an explanation that is perfectly plausible. Here's what Salon's Aaron Kinney wrote : " The AP database includes two other images from the same scene by photographer Dave Martin that refer to looters in the captions, though neither actually shows an explicit act of looting. Jack Stokes, AP's director of media relations, confirmed today that Martin says he witnessed the people in his images looting a grocery store. 'He saw the person go into the shop and take the goods,' Stokes said, 'and that's why he wrote 'looting' in the caption.' Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography, told Salon that all captions are vetted by editors and are the result of a dialogue between editor and photographer. Lyon said AP's policy is that each photographer can describe only what he or she actually sees. He added, 'When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods, we call it "looting."' On the other hand, he said, 'When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it "carrying items."'"

Why am I prepared to not dig deeper for the hidden conspiracy and just accept what the AP's flacks tell us? Because I have a hard time believing that one of the world's largest newswires decided that it would use Hurricane Katrina to finally start the big race war. It just doesn't wash, folks.

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.