Release The Hounds!

October 26, 2008 3:14 PM

How can I best use the Internet to find out who's behind a given website?

I was on Wonkette.com this weekend and saw this video of a reporter in Florida interviewing Joe Biden.

The Youtube source connected the video to a blog named America'sNewsToday.com/.org.

My question is: What is the most effective way of searching on the Internet for who is behind this blog, who the anchor is in the video, and discover who else might be involved in this blog?

My internet skills are pretty basic, and I want to be more adept at sleuthing out the election weirdness that I discover online.

posted by Lipstick Thespian to computers & internet (11 comments total)

You can use a whois service as a first step http://www.whois.net/
posted by mattoxic at 3:24 PM on October 26, 2008

The anchorwoman is Barbara West.
posted by Fairchild at 3:25 PM on October 26, 2008

Sorry, use this one... http://whois.domaintools.com/
posted by mattoxic at 3:25 PM on October 26, 2008

Some additional information about the interview.
posted by niles at 3:29 PM on October 26, 2008

Barbara West's bio from the WFTV website.
posted by Knappster at 3:31 PM on October 26, 2008

The "Investor Relations" phone number in the sidebar at AmericasNewsToday.com is for an unlisted landline in Westport, Connecticut.
posted by Knappster at 3:42 PM on October 26, 2008

The slanting of the stories, along with a cursory look at their advertisers, is fairly telling in itself. Quantcast says the site gets only around 6,000 hits/month, so given the number of articles on the site it seems that someone is using a right-wing aggregation site to do much of their initial work for them.

Interestingly, they've been aroun for a couple of years (found something they reported about Windows 3D Vista from over a year ago) but there's been a sudden and dramatic political bent to the reporting in the last few months. I wonder if the site was purchased and re-purposed....
posted by skywhite at 4:31 PM on October 26, 2008

do you have osx? open the terminal application and type in whois America'sNewsToday.com
posted by krautland at 4:44 PM on October 26, 2008

ask go daddy
posted by patnok at 4:49 PM on October 26, 2008

For searches like this, I use the Domain Dossier tool at Central Ops. Unfortunately, the blog you are interested in appears to be registered and hosted by GoDaddy using Domains by Proxy, which is used by people to hide (protect) their registration information.
posted by LightMayo at 5:08 PM on October 26, 2008

Well, first let me say, I'm not sure why it matters, that video was linked all over the net including by Drudge. To my knowledge, that site was not the first to upload it to youtube... many people uploaded it to all the video sharing services.

I guess I have questions about your question. Are you trying to dig dirt on the blog or the anchor??? It's a legit video if that's what you are wondering. You can go to the WFTV if you want to see the original source.

The fallout (if you're wondering that) is that Obama canceled an upcoming interview with the station and said the station would get an interview when hell froze over. (well he said it in political speak but you get the idea ;-) The station reported that they simply asked tough questions and if you want to be President of the U.S. you should be able to handle simple questions. (well, they said that in reporter speak but you get the idea. ;-)

Ok now that I answered all the questions you didn't ask, lemme answer the one you did. I'm a geek and I use domaintools.com ie: http://whois.domaintools.com/americasnewstoday.com

Domain tools keeps historical whois data. They charge for that service but they have a free trial. IIRC they do get a CC number from you and you have to cancel.. but anyway here is the meat of the record....

----
Registrant Search: "Domains by Proxy, Inc." was found in about 6,955,615 other domains
Registrar History: 1 registrar
NS History: 2 changes on 3 unique name servers over 2 years.
IP History: 6 changes on 6 unique name servers over 2 years.
Whois History: 22 records have been archived since 2006-04-06.
-----
(line by line comments)
Domains by Proxy is godaddy's private registration system.
It's only be registered at godaddy.
He's moved the site to several servers meaning he probably changed hosting companies.
And the providers have moved him.
He's made 22 updates to the whois record in 2 years.

All this tells me he has moved the blog around a lot (not uncommon) but frankly, there's nothing you can glean from this data.

Hope that helps.
posted by Jfalways at 5:33 PM on October 26, 2008