De Vellis Speaks

OK, confession time. I've been talking to former Sherrod Brown staffer and Vote Different mashup ad creator Phil De Vellis. When I read the piece on HuffPo, I sent an email off to the address he sent me when he left for DC. (Like I said, I always got along with Phil, even though I didn't agree with everything that happened in the campaign.) Phil verified to me that he had. We've had a couple of conversations since.

Phil wanted to lay low for awhile after the story broke and he posted his essay on HuffPo, so everything was off the record. As such, I steered clear of the controversy here because I was uncomfortable

Well, Phil is talking now. We spoke on the phone and he let me know about a couple of vids on YouTube.

First off, if you haven't seen it before, Olberman on the unmasking of Phil was pretty funny. I ran across it while looking for the other stuff:



Interview with Politics.tv.



Interview with YouTube



In both Phil explains the outlines of how he put the mashup together and why he did it. The new revelation I found most interesting was how he was found out. Ariana Huffington dispatched her people to make a list of people who could put together a video like it and called them. When she got to Phil, he owned up.