Was Triad City Beat Really Hacked? Part 2

Yesterday I posted Was Triad City Beat Really Hacked? I recommend you go back and read it along with the comments of Eric Ginsbirg and Brian Clarey of Triad City Beat.

My argument with Clarey and Ginsburg has been for months now that the Internet has raised the bar in terms of how much evidence anyone must present in order to make a story plausible. In Brian Clarey's story, The Weekender: The Hacker Edition, Brian provides us with zero evidence for his claims that their website was hacked. We are simply supposed to assume that Brian Clarey who calls himself a journalist and is posting to a Wordpress powered blog site that I proved in my previous post he owns, has more credibility than any other blogger.

Who died and made Brian Clarey God?

In my previous post I provided evidence via a website called WhoisHostingThis that Triad City Beat is hosted by a Chicago based company called Singlehop. In his comment Mr Clarey claimed his site is hosted by a Seattle based company but didn't bother to leave a name.

You see, Mr Clarey, that's documentation. I can't fake that and you know it. Blogs allow you to do that thus raising the bar of proof. Hyperlinks raise the bar of proof. And here's a little search engine optimization trick for you Mr Clarey: Outbound links increase your inbound traffic and increase your rankings in search engines. Now you know the secret as to how EzGreensboro consistently outranks Triad City Beat in search engine results. Well, you know part of the secret, the rest you'll pay dearly for.

Now what I could fake but didn't is this comment from Eric Ginsburg, the difference being Brian logged in to comment and someone claiming to be Eric didn't:

Now what we appear to be confirming here is that the story is part of an ongoing attack by Clarey and Company on the folks at Yes-Weekly!. You see, Yes-Weekly! publisher Charles Womack is the majority stockholder of Ziggy's and as someone identifying himself as Eric states in the comment:

"The story Brian is referring to in the email is one breaking the news that Ziggy's lease wouldn't be renewed. It's a big story. So far, it has 9,300+ views on our site, and a second,longer version of the story about Ziggy's closing has 1,700+ views. Who knows what the number would've been total if someone hadn't launched a cyber attack on us."

Like I documented in my post yesterday, Brian and company made a very concerted effort to bring attention to their story about Yes-Weekly even going so far as to get their sales manager Lamar Gibson, who I think highly of, to send me the link to their first story in an effort to get me to be Clarey's hatchet man despite the fact that Clarey and Company have deliberately ignored all the corruption pointed out here at EzGreensboro.com.

And yes, I have documentation to prove that should I need to. I have a long history of providing more documentation than any other blogger or journalist in the Piedmont Triad, bar none.

Getting back on topic, Clarey stated his site is hosted on a private server is in Seattle in contradiction to my findings that his site is hosted by Singlehop in Chicago. Could this by why?

Could it be Clarey and Company are buying server services from a 3rd party company selling repackaged Singlehop services? Neither Clarey nor the commenter claiming to be Eric told us the name of the hosting company they use or gave us any information that could be crosschecked or documented so who knows. As a matter of fact Clarey said:

"A phone call would have cleared that up, Billy."

To which I replied:

 "A phone call would have resulted in a bunch of unsubstantiated bullshit. Got documents? Show them. I did."

I've never claimed to be a journalist and I still don't claim to be a journalist today, but EzGreensboro and the Internet have raised the bar for journalism in Greensboro. Get with the program or be prepared to be ripped to shreds. And watch your advertising dollars dry up just as we did to the Rhino.