Tracking Reputations: 3.0 Meets 2.0

With the explosion in social networking comes a risk. The more you put out there online about yourself, the more potential there is for risk to your privacy and personal reputation. From blog comments to revenge ratings to angry retaliatory comments, almost anything can end up visible in a Google search. Employers are already using Google to find out additional information about prospective employees, and recent news about the law school admissions forum AutoAdmit revealed that Internet harassment of board members using racial, sexual, and homophobic slurs was coming to the attention of potential employers.

But how do you track what's being said about you? Or, if you are shopping or selling online in some of these spaces, how can you determine who is trustworthy? Two new services are coming to the rescue, and may be the first real intermingling of the Semantic Web with Web 2.0.

ReputationDefender is a fee-based service that allows you to subscribe for a monthly fee. In return for your payment, ReputationDefender will scour the Internet in search of any potentially embarrassing, libelous, slanderous, or privacy-invading information. From comments calling you a fraud to online posting of your address and phone number, ReputationDefender will deliver the information to you, and for an additional fee, implement their Destroy process to remove the offensive information. They also extend their service to monitor the same types of information on your children, with the same intent: to destroy potentially damaging information. Recent American Idol contestant Antonella Barba would probably have benefited from their service.

RapLeaf is another service that promises to help maintain reputations across multiple sites, but instead of tracking information like comments and blog posts, it links ratings of its users for sellers, buyers, swappers, and friends. By entering an email address, you can look up existing ratings for anyone already in the RapLeaf database, and if that person doesn't already have a listing, the site will at least do a rudimentary explanation of the reliability of the domain where the email is registered.

I can see RapLeaf becoming more valuable if it takes off, but at least for now, it doesn't link up with sites that already have existing ratings systems for their users, like eBay or Epinions. I checked three emails that I use online regularly: one for eBay, one for Epinions, and one for other shopping and trading transactions, and all three came up with no information. Even worse, the email I've used on eBay for seven years turned up as a having a higher risk than a Gmail account, even with seven years of feedback as a buyer and seller.

Obviously, these are first-generation sites that merit watching in the future. As more information migrates to the web, having a centralized tracking service to maintain control of that information is going to look more and more attractive.

Sources: VentureBeat, Virginia Law Weekly, The Washington Post