monkey talesThe tale that Monkey never told is the one everyone wants to hear.  For the last 8 months his blog Monkey Fables And Tales was the most popular blog at Entrecard.  Then 2 days ago his blog suddenly vanished from Blogspot with the following message “Sorry, the blog at monfat48.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”  As the twitter airwaves buzz with more questions than answers, let’s look at the two explanations given.

First the explanation given by Where The Hell Was I in this forum post.  Author Charlie Hatton claims Monkey Tales stole all his posts.  Doing my share of the legwork, I find Charlie’s claims to be true.  He is an established net personality and his posts pre-date Monkey’s posts by years.  There is no way he manufactured a fake Internet identity as a prank on Monkey Tales.

Monkey’s side of the story:  Before hearing the above accusation, I messaged Monkey Tale via Entrecard and asked him what happened.  Here is his message quoted in it’s entirety.  My apologies to anyone insulted by me posting an email without permission, but I no longer have any way to contact the author.

From: Monkey Fables And Tales

I’ve decided that EC isn’t for me any more. (And unlike others who quit, I decided I didn’t need a dramatic exit with a post condemning the place.)

I’m putting all blogging on hold for awhile as well since it appears the business I work for is having a rough go of it with the economy spiraling down.

(We sell high end beds and accessories and I’m going to put more time and effort into that right now in an effort to get sales back on track, which my boss would appreciate.)

Mike”

Who to believe?  While not a personal friend off Monkey Tale, I always liked the guy.  He seemed to be a stand up guy in an Internet world of scammers and spammers.  More than once I read forum posts of his complaining about “crap” written by other people.   Yet, I have to look at the Google evidence.  Almost every post was stolen.

Why it gets weirder:

  • Monkey Tales did not have a single ad on his blog.  Not even AdSense.  He made no money from his actions
  • Monkey had many blogs in the system, all written for the purpose of generating credits to advertise for his main blog.
  • Monkey dropped many cards per day, probably 1300-1500 each and every day.
  • Monkey’s blog was a blogspot domain, he couldn’t even sell the domain name in the end.

So, did Monkey Tales fool all the people all the time?   If he did, I think an apology to the original authors he stole from and to his readers is in order.  Either way, I welcome him to contact me and I will post either his apology or rebuttal to the accusations.  In the end, I’m not really angry at Monkey. For the first time he actually made me laugh.

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