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
