Microsoft is offering a test drive of the beta (2) release of Office 2007 here, which is cool…except for two things: according to the system I have to wait 37 minutes before I can have my go, and secondly, and for me the worst thing: you have to use IE to access it….it makes you sort of wish Robert Scoble was staying on at Microsoft doesn’t it.
Archives For General
Foreword: For those of you who have been following this saga, thanks for your emails and comments. Patrick Grote summed it up really well for my liking in terms of my own disappointment in terms of Joel Comm’s current activities, and also has some interesting finds in terms of duplicate content that are worth further investigation as well..check it out. Mike also pointed out Joel Comm promoting a program called Instant Article Ghost Writer in the comments..hmm, sounds really legit (not). Also, aside from the general breaching of Google’s TOS, I also noticed (by accident) this post from Jensense that suggests that Joel’s promotion of images next to Google ads may also be dodgy…further food for thought.
Part 2 isn’t about Yaro’s involvement today (and I’d note Yaro has made some changes to his original post), but as a result of a number of Yaro’s supporters in the original post in this series suggesting that Joel Comm can’t be judged based on his previous relationship with spam blog promoter Rick Butts. You see, as I dug deeper into this whole “Made for Adsense” bought to you by Joel Comm venture, one name kept coming up: Eric Holmlund. It’s not a name I was familiar with, and an initial Google search yesterday didn’t bring up an awful lot. But the more I dug, the more I found.
Introducing Eric Holmlund.
So who is Eric Holmlund? Well, although Joel Comm’s name is on the Made for Adsense program he is promoting, Eric Holmlund is actually the brains (for lack of a better word) behind the program, at least in terms of designing the templates. Joel Comm lists Eric Holmlund as being the primary contact for product/ site questions for the program here:
The Register reports that Telecom New Zealand has announced plans to create an independent wholesale operation to promote competition in the industry.
These quotes are interesting:
If successful, rival operators should be able to get equal access to Telecom’s wholesale network, giving them greater scope to compete and invest in broadband services.
“The country expects world-class broadband services, and our decision to reorganise our business is one more step towards ensuring healthy competition exists to provide that,” incoming Telecom chairman Wayne Boyd said.
So why can’t we have the same thing here in Australia, where Telstra arguably actually has a stronger market position than Telecom New Zealand does in New Zealand? World class broadband….now that would be nice wouldn’t it…real competition on a level playing field….ahhh, my utopian visions of the Australian telecommunications market, proudly kyboshed by the Australian Government.
Tags: Telecom New Zealand, Telstra
Spotted this one at the Search Engine Journal, Search Status, a Firefox plugin that integrates Alexa rankings (and naturally phones home to Alexa as well to track your page viewing habits) into Firefox, where as Amazon/ Alexa has never gotten around to providing something similar themselves. It also displays Google PageRank, all in the bottom right hand corner of Firefox….very nice indeed.
Tags: Alexa
After yesterday’s little flame war caused by Yaro Starak defending Joel Comm’s latest offering, “Instant Adsense Templates”as being legitimate, I was fortunate enough to get a tip from a reader of the preview of the templates and marketing system Joel Comm is offering readers for $197…and although he chucks in some WordPress templates, the bulk of it is good ol’ fashioned Made for Adsense spam pages, plain and simple.
But let me prove it.
The samples
In his email to his “joint venture” (JV) partners, Joel provides access to a password protected page (click on images for larger versions):
I’ve been following with interest an up and coming Australian blogger for some time, one Yaro Starak, who writes an interesting blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey. To date, I’ve found Yaro’s content a worth while read… then last week he decided to flog Made for Adsense templates from Joel Comm, a guy who I’ve written about in the past (back on the ol’ Weblog Empire blog, link now dead but reference to it here) who does a lot of promotional work with spam blog creators and others who make bloggers lives hard. I decided not to post a negative review of Yaro’s work at the time, but thought I’d leave a comment on his blog, below the post, expressing my disappointment that Yaro was not only promoting “Made for Adsense” sites that breach the Google Adsense TOS/ Guidelines, but also promoting products from someone like Joel Comm, who’s business relationship aren’t all that flash.
Fast forward to today and I hadn’t read his feed for a couple of days, and I read this post, where Yaro accuses me (without naming me) of making untrue allegations, and totally fails to even attempt to justify his atttempts to profit from a product that pollutes the internet.
Now, as I’ve said in the past, I don’t believe that Joel Comm is, himself, undertaking any illegal activities, and indeed his sites (as far as I’m aware) are all legit. It’s the fact that he does business with people like Rick Butts that I don’t like.
Since Yaro is either too dumb to use Google, or just plain lazy, a quick search finds this page. Indeed, there’s plenty in Google about Joel Comm and Rick Butts.
But is Rick Butts a bad guy? Read this, or this, or this, or this, or how bout the Wall Street Journal Yaro?, and I quote:
BlogBurner’s founder, Rick Butts, denies that his software is used by spammers. He says it is used by business owners to automatically create blogs based on content pulled from their Web sites. He acknowledges that the blogs being created by BlogBurner are often used to help draw attention to a company’s main Web site. “I’m not going to pretend to say we’re altruistically creating blogs for humans to read,” he says, adding that other companies have mimicked his software and sold it to spammers.
Nice chap that. Yaro, as I noted in my comment, which you deleted, I believe your readers would have expected more from you. You trade on your integrity and now you’re flogging (at best grey) made for adsense templates from a guy who does business with the bad guys, and the fact that you’re not even remotely apologetic says it all.
Yaro Starak, so long, and thanks for all the spam.
Tags: Yaro Starak, spam blogs, splogs, comment spam, made for adsense temsplates
Check this video in full, then tell me, what’s wrong with this picture, aside from the obvious reactions 🙂
Got to admit, I love Big Brother’s Camilla. I felt so bad when I read this, she’s a great girl with a great personality….maybe I should jet to the Gold Coast if (and when) she’s evicted and offer her a b5media gig! I’d love to have that voice here!.
Tags: Camilla, Big Brother
This is way funny, via Computerworld quoting a Bill Gates interview with the WSJ:
WSJ: You watch physics lectures and Harlem Globetrotters [on YouTube]?
Gates: This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
WSJ: But those were stolen, correct?
Gates: Stolen’s a strong word. It’s copyrighted content that the owner wasn’t paid for. So yes.
I wonder in Gates uses Bittorrent as well? 🙂
Tags: Bill Gates, Microsoft, YouTube
Opera have announced the latest version of their browser, and unfortunately it still doesn’t do it for me. Got to say it’s a vast improvement over some of their earlier versions, it’s (fairly) quick, it renders CSS properly (I can still remember problems with v7), and their Widgets are pretty cool….its getting close but I hate the way they do tabs. I hate having to click on the tab to close it, and then it takes you back to the last tab you were reading….very annoying given I like to open up a whole pile of tabs in Firefox then read them one by one…in order. However, if you are using IE and don’t like Firefox give it a shot.
Tags: Opera
