Phil Kaplan was known for F***edcompany.com, a web rumor-mill filled with juicy topics back in the dotcom heyday on the demise of numerous venture-backed, founder-bootstrapped and fabled attempts to build real digital media businesses. We all know and respect Phil, having gone on to found Adbrite but more importantly always being honest and sincere (albeit sometimes distasteful) in both his FC website postings as well as his business practices.

Enter Josh Stomel, a southern california hyper-networker, headhunter and … libeler? Known as the Perez Hilton of internet company gossip and leaks, we recently caught up with “the terror of southland CEOs” in a little bit of our own digging. Josh Stomel, who once worked at Yahoo, Lowermybills and Oversee.net parted ways un-amicably from all three of his ex-employers, at the same time keeping good relationships with their employees due to his natural relationship building skills. No doubt, Rumory focuses on Yahoo, Lowermybills, Oversee and a handful of other california based startups known to work with or have relationships with Josh.

Josh charges clients cash plus stock options in exchange for employees from his ex-employers. In this VentureHeadHunter model, he has made just as many enemies in California as he has made friends. And that’s not just the beginning. In 2006 Josh Stomel used his same network and access to information through recruiting channels to start his own blog. After plagiarizing numerous popular blogs out there, he gained a reputation for being the poster boy of dotcom gossip, vanity and bad grammar (http://www.google.com/search?q=josh+stomel+plag...) though we now think that his office mates share in the writing so as to provide variety in prose.

Though he and team post as “Anonymous”, with a little help from our IT friends Dave and Seemesh, we were able to find the connection to Josh Stomel through another way:

1. The owner of Rumory.com owns Dividethebills.com (Lowermybills knockoff), a domain Josh Stomel bought back in the day.
http://www.domaintools.com/reverse-ip/?hostname...

2. Dividethebills.com (64.13.225.75) resides on a server hosted at a Culver City, CA ISP named Media Temple Inc.
http://ws.arin.net/whois?queryinput=64.13.225.75

3. Rumory.com resides on the same server or as the Dividethebills.com server at Media Temple Inc.
PING http://www.dividethebills.com (64.13.225.75): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 64.13.225.75: icmp_seq=0 ttl=51 time=83.945 ms

4. Resumebucket.com (64.13.231.22) shares the same IP space as Rumory.com
http://ws.arin.net/whois?queryinput=64.13.231.22

5. Resumebucket, along with Neohire, is the brainchild of Josh Stomel and folks recruited out of his ex-companies.

We say the following to Josh: What goes around comes around. Integrity in a seemingly large but ultimately small industry is one’s greatest asset. If you tarnish company reputations, at least man up and don’t post as Anonymous. Take a page out of Phil Kaplan’s book and reveal yourself. Or at least employ one of those bright techies you’ve poached to cover your tracks a little better.

As Samuel Butler once wrote, “The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance”.