Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik was recently featured on Federal News Network. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we have this informative and entertaining interview on the Reputation.com Blog for your listening pleasure and personal edification. Enjoy!

Imagine your 92-year-old grandfather using the Internet. Now imagine that your 92-year-old grandfather is an aging Academy Award-nominated movie star. Congratulations, you just wrote a Reuter’s story (or a Reputation.com blog post)!

We saw this story from Reuters detailing how Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas has gone all Web 2.0 and is using teh internetz to blog and keep in touch with his numerous MySpace friends (over 4000 according to the story). The piece highlights how Douglas, father of Michael Douglas (whom we love if for no other reason than he was in “The Game” and dropped through the ceiling of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco), is able to interact with people, bringing his personality to life through the written word. The blog also serves a purpose to promote Douglas’ recent memoir, “Let’s Face It” and permits him to “make full use of mood icons such as an animated cat with accompanying words like ‘creative’ and ‘contemplative,’” something that the publishing industry is loathe to let you do, even if Catherine Zeta Jones is your daughter-in-law.

It used to be not long ago that old folks were scared of the Internet and the tubes that it is comprised of. Who can blame them? Have you paid for a plumber lately? I can only imagine what he’d charge you to clean your cache out. It is interesting to see that the medium of blogs, in as much as they are unfiltered notes/essays/whatever, has become more user-friendly and a main-stream channel. We encourage people to get out there and be active on the Internet, define yourself, create your own space. And hey, if you have a book to push, this is just another new marketing channel.

Hmmmm….  One wonders if this proposal offers a real level of protection or is just, well, “a low common denominator,” as the privacy advocate Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology is quoted as saying.

-Michael Fertik

Reputation.com Blog recently caught this well written piece over at Rotten Little Girls. The post, entitled “The Nasty Side of Social Networking” is both informative and a good read. It also does a good job of articulating some of the more complex issues related to online social networking from a collegiate perspective.

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Specifically, the article looks at the post-privacy reality of Facebook and notes that password protected information can still get online and affect one’s job prespects and digital street cred. It also looks at JuicyCampus, online gossip and the ease with which anonymous posting can ruin people’s names.

As I read through the pages, I was tense and apprehensive. I didn’t see any references to my close friends, but I did find a post specifically about the group of girls living in the housing unit next to me. It said where they lived, which is just creepy, and then the poster called them stuck-up, anorexic, and many expletives I don’t care to repeat here.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik even gets a shout out via his quote in the International Herald Tribune:

To quote a recent article in the Herald Tribune, “‘Legally, Juicy Campus is fully, absolutely immune, no matter what it runs on its site from users, just like AOL is not responsible for nasty comments in its AOL chat rooms,’ said Michael Fertik, a graduate of Harvard Law School and the founder of reputationdefender.com, a service that helps clients remove defamatory material about themselves from the Internet…Juicy Campus, he said, ‘is not encouraging people to be themselves, it’s encouraging people to be the worst version of themselves.’”

The article concludes with the author deciding not to participate in anonymous gossip sites.

I’m going to exert as much willpower as I can to avoid Juicy Campus. I think the fact that it promotes prejudice and an anything-goes policy of ripping your classmates to shreds is enough to dissuade me from visiting the site often. That, and I don’t really want to know what my classmates are thinking about me. Some things are better left un-read.

What do you think? Is gossip a harmless part of the wired collegiate experience or is there something nefarious about talking trash about the student body online?

Recently Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik attended the Israeli Business Conference in Tel Aviv.

While there, Mr. Fertik had the opportunity to sit for an interview and spread the word about Online Reputation Management and the Reputational Risk that individuals and companies face in the internet era. Globes has the video here and you can also view the RD fearless leader here.

Michael Fertik raises a few interesting points about multi-directional messaging inherent to digital communications and the need manage one’s internet identity effectively.