Recently I saw a blog on urbanvancouver.com from a new user called Joseph Elite. It was a story about wanting to help children and discovering this great concept called the ERA. The blog read more like an ad than anything. It made me suspicious. So I started hunting around the web. This exact same blog was everywhere. Sites like Gather, Hub, Tazzu, all with the same text or something very similar. One site had the name Joseph Gallos. I did some googling and found that he is employed by the ERA with the task of making them #1 in google ranking. there is a word for false blogging, it is called astroturfing, and it is as bad as spam, maybe even worse.
I quickly found a site called oDesk, which showed Jospeh Gallos accepting the job from the ERA. Take a look at the screen shot, as he may have removed his name by now. Click on it for full image.
I don't mind someone getting paid some money for web work, even if its only $5.56/hr. However when you start paying professionals to make up false blogs to get people to use your business, that is un-ethical. The ERA is already a "non-profit", which often makes people think they are legit. To further use the idea of personal charity or a "heart warming story" to fool people into donating computer equipment (which is worth a lot in the scrap market, especially for export), is wrong.
I started to post comments on some of these sites to alert people to this. Some web admins took the blogs off right away. I provided links to Joseph Gallos personal website where he listed the ERA as a client. You can see a web shot of his site before he took off the ERA. Click on it for full image.
Also on his index page of his web site, he had a contact listed as joseph@era.ca which is now a hyperlink titled Personal Contact, which still emails his era.ca email.Now that his blog was removed from Gather.com under the user name Joseph Gallos, I assume he made a new user account named J.W. and posted the exact same blog, but this time the comments must be approved first.
$5.85/hr doesn't buy you much these days I guess.
If the ERA is doing such a good job, blogs about their service should come naturally. Instead the ERA has chosen to pollute the internet with these false ads. This makes me question all their business practices.
I urge people who find similar posts on the web to notify the sites web admin to the false nature of the this ERA blog, and have them remove it. Also please notify me on this blog so we can all keep up to date on this story.
