Authorship
The video, which has a "home-made, humorous quality", was posted on YouTube by "Toutsmith," a person who identified himself as a 29-year-old from Beverly Hills. The video was released on May 24, 2006, the same date as the release of An Inconvenient Truth. The Wall Street Journal journalist Antonio Regalado noticed that, despite the amateur production values, a link to the video was the first sponsored listing when he performed a Google search for Al Gore, suggesting to him that someone was paying money to advertise this 'amateur' video. Regalado examined routing information on an e-mail sent by Toutsmith to Regalado and found that the e-mail had been sent from a computer associated with the DCI Group, in Washington, D.C..
When asked if they created the video, DCI Group responded "We do not disclose the names of our clients, nor do we discuss the work we do on behalf of our clients." The Wall Street Journal also found that sponsored links to the Al Gore video had been placed on Google, and were taken down after DCI was contacted by the Journal. The identity of the party who paid for the sponsored links remains unknown.
Read more about this topic: Al Gore's Penguin Army
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