Bonus question for five extra points and your chance at our grand prize can you name who lamented the loss of his reputation  ”Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. Give up? Of course not you can name the fellow in a moment because you only need paste that into Google and TaDaa…it was that idiot Cassio from Othello. I say idiot because having been in a touring production of that play waaay back in the day bits of it are firmly lodged in what remains of my memory…and the love sick idiocy of Cassio (presumably not named for the calculator) has for some odd reason remained fresh to this day…ah the power of great writing.

I was prompted to that inane rambling by a post from the Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa, where she gave some excellent advice about managing your online reputation. Her jumping off point was to lament that there is a ridiculous college photo of her posted online which used to show up on searches for her done under her maiden name. When she married that problem went away. I’m probably not the first person to point out to her that merely mentioning that problem in a public search forum is just inviting someone to spend the $1.95 required to research such a unique name and post all about it online so the dreaded picture will once again show up on her own search engine. I would never do such a thing, it’s tough enough that the poor lady has a birthday that close to Christmas…Oh..no wait! But seriously it’s a real issue and I mentioned the likely impact the new Google Side Wiki will have on just this issue in my last post. The word from Google is that they didn’t create the internet and aren’t responsible for the results they display, that’s obviously true and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act means that they have to keep it that way in order to preserve their safe harbor. Putting a tool like the Side Wiki out there to facilitate malicious reputation assasination probably won’t help make this problem go away.

Her comments can be summed up reasonably simply as “don’t post dumb stuff about yourself” and “do post good stuff.” The first rule is widely ignored by millions who apparantly haven’t recognized that the Internet is forever. An excellent corporate attorney I once worked with advised me thus “Never write anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to hear read out in court” it’s sound advice and applies doubly to images and videos. On a side note, I seem to remember reading that Gmail was deploying a feature where it would hold mail created after 10pm on a Friday or Saturday evening for more sober review….not sure if that ever happened but it’s a neat idea.

So…take a couple of moments and read the post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/managing-your-reputation-through-search.html and think twice before you put that hillarious pic up on facebook.