Visit Maine!

Garrett links to a fascinating story about the Maine Tourism office. In short, the Maine Web Report uncovered massive corruption and incompetence in the ad agency handling Maine's web tourism.

Ed Cone sums up the problems, but here's a summary of the sheer insanity of the situation... basically an ad agency is wasting $3.9 million of Maine taxpayers' money on a badly designed website and ads that list a phone sex number instead of the tourism office phone number.

And now, the scummy ad agency has filed a lawsuit against the blogger who uncovered their corruption, and have been harrassing him. They've contacted the blogger's wife's employer to try to threaten him into silence. They've contacted his clients and tried to ruin his business. And now a libel lawsuit that they clearly intend to win by intimidation and not on merit. If you've got a blog, spread this story around. Even if they take down the Maine Web Report, this is a story that ought not to die.