I am very excited about the new website, back-end, and functionality Reputation.com  just released (unleashed?!) this week.  We are providing our members with greatly enhanced usability and many new and long-requested features.

One of my favorite features of the new system is the “quick action” buttons that allow users to ignore, remove, or add items within their reports with only a single click.  Also we’ve launched a shopping cart for Destroy assistance, so you can order multiple items to be removed at once.  And now you can add more family members to your account to give your people maximum control over their personal data.

We’re proud of the upgrades, and we hope you will enjoy them.

Michael Fertik

Jennifer Leggio has quite the scoop over at ZDnet. They recently broke a story concerning Reputation.com and Enterprise Level Online Reputation Management. The story itself is quite good and worth a read to get all the details.

Quoting from the article and Reputation.com co-founder and EVP Owen Tripp:

“Our fully branded enterprise product will include many of the services we already offer but with more frequent reports,” Tripp said. “We’ll be able to do searches around the enterprise or executives and will track even how employees are publicly discussing the company. ”

The enterprise reputation management product was built on the same principles of the MyReputation product, which scrapes the open Web — and what Reputation.com calls the “invisible Web” — and presents a report of all findings. With the personal services only, if the report shows the individual anything he or she finds to be libelous, damaging or untrue, Reputation.com will then go into action to try to get the potentially defamatory information stricken from the Web. The company will not do destroys for enterprises or organizations.

Beyond monitoring and reporting, however, Tripp says that a key part of enterprise reputation management is proactively inserting a company’s desired image into every layer of the Web. Part of this service will include helping enterprises do just that — ensuring that the major search engines always show the desired results.

“The first 10 or 15 things we see on a search engine are going to help shape our perception of a company. Proactive enterprise reputation management is far beyond issuing press releases and it can’t be achieved with just standard SEO, either. It’s about figuring out key vulnerabilities in the way a firm is presented online and addressing them and managing them head on,” Tripp said.

“You can’t just look at the name of a firm and the name of the products or even just the names of the officers. In considering how your company strategy is presented, you need to look at who your officers are and what their roles are in how each of them are portrayed in all facets of the Web,” he said. “If you want your enterprise presence and message to be pervasive and part of your company lure you need to have it perfectly optimized.”

Reputation.com looks forward to working with corporations in the future and bringing enterprise level online reputation management solutions to companies around the globe. And special thanks to the newshounds over at ZDNet, who got wind of this before anyone else.

eputationDefender has been the leader in worldwide Online Reputation Management since its founding a little over two years ago. Reputation.com is pleased to have received inquiries from over 38 countries across the globe and has done business on every continent except Antarctica (If any of you south pole researchers are looking to spruce up your online presence, we would be happy to give you an Edge). From Africa to Europe and beyond, Reputation.com has helped people around the world become anonymous online and help block unwanted email.

Our employees are also global citizens and frequently travel the world for both business and pleasure. Recently an RD worker named Adam wound up in Thailand for his summer vacation and proudly proselytized the Reputation.com brand during his trip.

Nice work, Adam. Any other international RepDef fans out there? Whether you are south of the border or across the pond, we’d love to hear from you!

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an interesting piece entitled “The Downsides To Blogging About Your Kid,” in which Cybele Weisser discusses the possible pitfalls associated with Cyber Parenting. She runs a blog with public photos of her son. The internet allows friends and family to watch the child grow up.

Sometimes, though, the site also serves as an unfortunate reminder of the Internet’s not-so-innocent side. A few days ago, for instance, I noticed that some of the recent photos we’d posted had an extraordinary number of views, the result of people searching for keywords such as “bedtime, “nursing,” and “pj’s.”

Privacy concerns stemming from the public display of family photos include Cyber Stalking and balancing the protection of children online with wanting to share their development with loved ones. Other points of view brought up in the piece and in the comments include making a website private to keep predatory web surfers out of your digital family life and concerns that this album could prove embarrasing to the child as he matures.

What do you think? Are parenting blogs putting children at risk? Are we over exposing the intimate details about our lives? And when the kids grow up, will they ever live down their baby blog?

Until recently, the Internet has been an open playground: You could do whatever you liked, and if you did something wrong you got in trouble after the fact. But now politicians and others are pushing to make intermediaries, like ISPs and auction sites, filter content before it gets to users. The Internet of the future might be an Internet with limits on what you can do.

As always, I’m guest-blogging and I don’t represent the views of Reputation.com.

Most recently, three major ISPs–Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable–recently bowed to pressure from the Attorney General of the state of New York and agreed to stop carrying Usenet newsgroups that contain child pornography and other reprehensible content.

First, a brief history lesson: “Usenet” is a throwback to the early days of the Internet. It is a set of discussion areas–”newsgroups–that were very popular in the 1990s as a way to discuss everything from programming to politics. In more recent years, the popularity of Usenet has fallen the Web (what you’re using right now) became more important. But, some people still communicate through Usenet. And a small fraction of those people use it to send child pornography and other illegal material to each other.

Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner Cable stopped “hosting” some Usenet newsgroups on their own servers. As a result, the ISPs are no longer providing access directly to subscribers. It’s still possible for subscribers of those ISPs to access the newsgroups, such as by paying $10 to $20 per month for access through a web-based Usenet gateway (a service that shows Usenet through a web browser). A good analogy to what these ISPs did would be if your ISP no longer provided email service and you had to pay another company for web-based email.

This is one of the first times that a major ISP has limited its services on the basis of content. While any customer can still access any newsgroup they want, the ISP has made it substantially more difficult to access newsgroups that contain illegal content. Some think this is the first step toward ISPs enforcing content controls based on other forms of illegal content, like music or video file sharing and possibly even going as far as restricting the transmission of libelous or false information online.

Current laws, combined with the nature of the Internet, put a lot of pressure on ISPs to filter content. Because the Internet is global, harmful and illegal content can easily be found overseas. U.S. politicians can’t control what overseas websites do, since U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over many foreign websites, and even if there were jurisdiction it would be a nightmare to try to try to enforce the laws overseas. But, U.S. politicians know that every web user has to use an ISP to get online. And they know that ISPs that serve the U.S. are subject to U.S. law and can easily be dragged into U.S. courts. Even more importantly in this case, it’s a lot easier to go after a handful of ISPs than it is to try to track down and locate many anonymous Usenet users who posted the original illegal images. Thanks to anonymity services like TOR, it may be completely impossible to locate the people who first put the underage images on Usenet. But, the government can find the major ISPs just by looking in the phone book. It’s a lot easier to go after the known intermediary than it is to chase down foreign or anonymous wrongdoers.

The same is why the RIAA hopes to filter music file sharing before it reaches customers. If ISPs block file sharing, then the RIAA won’t have to chase anonymous or overseas file sharers.

The U.S. isn’t the only country where intermediaries–like ISPs–are being held liable for wrongdoing by other users. A recent court case in France held eBay liable for fake handbags sold by independent sellers on eBay. Again, the reasoning went that it’s easier to force eBay to solve the problem than it is to chase down many small-time sellers of fake handbags.

Is this the first step toward extensive filtering, going as far as ISPs stopping the transmission of sites that contain libelous or hurtful materials? It’s technically possible for this to happen. Spam blacklists already exist. And lots of programs — like McAffee’s “SiteAdvisor” — already detect some forms of malware and provide warnings to users before proceeding. Google already warns users about pages that might be dangerous, based on their own internal blacklist. And some ISPs already block certain emails under the guise of being viruses or spam.

Adding another filter for sites that have been ranked as hurtful or libelous by enough users would just be another simple step, nothing more than a Digg-like button “bury as inaccurate” for the world. It’s entirely possible that ISPs could display a message that “this site has been marked as inaccurate by 40% of visitors.” We’re really not that far away from having this capability: sites like StumbleUpon use a Firefox extension to rate literally millions of websites.

Of course, what about the First Amendment? After all, the government can’t just censor all speech that it doesn’t like. But, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that child pornography is not protected under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has also held that libel–malicious lies about a private individual–is also given not protected under the First Amendment. So, under current law, it’s at least theoretically possible for a state government (like New York in the case of child pornography on Usenet) to threaten ISPs to stop providing access to some kinds of objectionable content. Of course, if government-mandated web filtering ever became common then we’d likely see another challenge in the Supreme Court, possibly with a different outcome.

In the end, it’s not clear whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. There’s plenty of things, like child pornography, that is so disgusting that something needs to be done to stop its spread. And, this most recent move by the New York ISPs suggests that illegal images are still prevalent, despite many attempts by law enforcement to find and prosecute the people who take them. And ISP warning for libelous or hurtful content might save thousands of reputations from unfair But, ISP filtering is also dangerous if it’s applied overzealously to things like file-sharing: there are plenty of forms of file-sharing that are legal (for example, many downloads of the Linux operating system use file-sharing networks to speed up downloads and to allow many users to download updated versions at the same time). Filtering could also be abused for political purposes, but it’s unlikely that the Supreme Court would allow it.

What do you think? Is this the end of the open playground? A step toward moral responsibility for ISPs? Or plain old censorship?

* As always, I’m guest-blogging by invitation, I don’t necessarily represent the views of Reputation.com or any of its headcount, and I hope to start a discussion rather than providing definite answers.