With reports of sackings on account of Facebook profiles and careless tweeting, a lot of people are probably rather worried about the Internet and what it might dig up about them. Everybody has some skeletons in their closet that they’d rather didn’t see the light of day: those pictures from the stag weekend and that drunken debate you got into about Paul McCartney being the best Beatle*. But the Internet is dark and mysterious and it remembers everything, so what chance of absolution for ordinary people?

The answer is good news, Mayfield explains. You don’t need to be a technical genius or have to hack into Google’s servers to make sure that your online representation shows your good side. All you need is to be diligent; create a plan and stick to it. The thing is that Google is desperate for information about you – so if you make it, and it’s well-written, clearly structured, interlinked and kept up-to-date, then that is what will appear in a search result. Slurs and dodgy pictures won’t disappear, but you have every opportunity to become the de-facto source of information about yourself. Then, if you get involved in professional or social networks and offer value, people will link to you and your material, giving even more weight to your credentials as a source. As I wrote recently, yes, there will be pictures that make you look silly, possibly negative remarks and perhaps things you regret – but your online reputation is the balance of positive and negative, and tilted towards the recency of the material and its credibility. Unless you’re a celebrity under daily scrutiny by national newspapers, you’ve got the opportunity to control of all of that.

The first part of the book explains how to find out what the Internet thinks of you, through Google Searches and more specialised tools like Spezify and Social Mention. The second part sets out how you can claim and control your online identity by joining social networks, making sure your profiles are fresh and accurate and possibly starting your own blog or website. The third and final section goes into more depth on how to make the best use of Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. At every point, there are well-considered and wise tips on best practise and other sites you might like to explore, as well as advice for problems like negative comments, people who ask too much of you or who post information you’d prefer to remain private. While Mayfield is one of the world’s leading experts on the social web, he maintains a humility and willingness to learn that is not only extremely endearing, but also makes him more credible as an advisor.

So, a thumbs-up. It’s probably not for you, of course. If you read this blog, you’re likely to be well-versed in all of this, but maybe a great present for loved ones who really ought to be more aware of their options. This book is an empowering, well-written and non-technical guide that they will appreciate.

*I once claimed this. In a drunken debate. Sorry, alright. I KNOW.

Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington believes that the era of trying to manage one’s online reputation is almost over:

Trying to control, or even manage, your online reputation is becoming increasingly difficult. And much like the fight by big labels against the illegal sharing of music, it will soon become pointless to even try. It’s time we all just give up on the small fights and become more accepting of the indiscretions of our fellow humans. Because the skeletons are coming out of the closet and onto the front porch.

I can kind of see what he means. Yes, it’s quite likely that bad reviews of you, your business and your dog will appear on the Web, and there won’t be very much that you are able to do to prevent or correct that. Indeed, we will need to become thicker skinned and more forgiving of people’s indiscretions.

However, there are multiple flaws in the argument.

Pretty much the show-stopper for me is the total confusion between ‘online reputation’ and ‘bad things some people say on the Web’.

What is (for example) TV chef Jamie Oliver’s reputation?

His food and restaurants tend to get fairly good reviews. He’s campaigned to improve the nutritional value of children’s school dinners, a popular move in the eyes of pretty much everyone except pie manufacturers. His shows keep getting commissioned, so are presumably popular. Recently, he’s apparently been having a hard time convincing the US of the virtues of healthy eating, but got sympathetic stories and an appearance on Oprah as a result.

But then… it took me about two seconds to find this, this and this (sweary, not-so-positive websites about JO). And quite a lot more where they came from.

So what to make of that? Chirpy chap or mockney tw**?

The main way we gauge someone or something’s reputation online is by Googling them. As Clive Thompson wrote ages ago in Wired:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

So, if you’ll allow me to take Google as the arbiter of reputation, when you search for Oliver then the top result, after the news, is his own site, followed by his restaurant’s sites, followed by his other brands. There are no negative references on the first four pages of the Google search for his name. And having discovered that, if you then bump into one of the bad sites, then you’ll take what they say with a pinch of salt. They still exist, but it is the mix and sum of the data we can acquire, their provenance, their credibility and how Google sorts them which goes to form an online reputation.

What Oliver is doing by creating all these sites and content is called managing your online reputation*. And it quite clearly still works.

picture credit: tommatsch

*Oliver’s been blogging since 2003, which is pretty impressive by any measure.

On most news organisations’ websites, you’ll find a widget called ‘most read’, ‘most shared’ or ‘most commented’, possibly all three. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist experiment suggests an interesting alternative.

Typically, the content found in the most-X sections provides a salutary — if depressing — reminder of humanity’s baseness and stupidity. What tends to get flagged is not ‘Picasso retrospective opens at the ICA’ or ‘Proposed Amendments to Digital Economy Bill’: it’s ‘footballer shags team-mate’s wife’. If you’re seeking the Wisdom of Crowds, look away now.

Here’s the latest from the BBC:

Even worse is the equivalent list from the Telegraph:

Not to mention the Daily Mail:

Oh dear, oh dear. Showbiz, trivia, sport, sex and weirdness. And these aren’t tabloid publications. The Telegraph, in particular, paints itself as a serious business and politics paper with a concern for moral values. Its readers, on the other hand, appear to prefer sex scandals and weird animals. I can’t imagine its editors are especially proud of these results but ultimately have to shrug and be grateful for the extra page-views.

The Guardian has a similar widget, which isn’t as lowlife as the examples above, but again favours the funny and the odd.

Newspapers and news organisations are in a strange position with regard to these most-popular lists. The short-term value is that they flag up the items that new visitors are most likely to click on and enjoy. They get more page views out of their visitors and thus more advertising inventory to sell. They help the organisation bolster their claims to advertisers that their sites are busy and popular. Readers get what they want quickly and leave happily.

On the other hand. There’s a long term devaluation coming out of this for serious papers. When they sell to advertisers, they aren’t just selling so-many million eyeballs much of the time. They’re selling a certain quality of readership and particular brand values. For readers, there’s a similar brand attachment. They go to a serious news site because they trust the brand and want serious coverage. If they then end up then clicking on the story about a funny-looking gorilla, then that’s their own affair. Maybe, rationally, they should have gone to weirdanimalpix.com, but they don’t see themselves as the sort of person who does that.

What’s more. Papers don’t really have an ad-inventory problem. They generate thousands of new pages and hundreds of thousands of impressions a day and rarely sell more than 20% of what they have to offer. The only real reason for driving page views is the arms-war between the Nationals over who is the most popular. And being the most popular isn’t a great argument to advertisers if you are simultaneously claiming that your readership represents an elite, as is likely for any serious news site.

So maybe it’s a good idea to find a middle-ground; a way for serious news organisations’ websites to highlight popular items that doesn’t make them look like a zoo for morons: for readers or advertisers. The Guardian’s Zeitgeist – launched today – is one attempt to find that middle ground.

The idea is that it blends populism and curation. The most popular stories will appear on the grid, as you’d expect, BUT:

• The different sections of the site – news, features, opinion, sport, etc. — remain balanced in the proportions conceived by the editors. So if 90% of its visitors are looking at Sports stories, it still only occupies 2–3 slots on the grid.
• Like is compared with like. For example, Charlie Brooker’s satirical swipes at popular media are perennially popular on the site, but will only hit the grid if a particular column is more popular than the norm.

Guardian communities editor Meg Pickard explains:

…we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

We’re taking a range of these variables — enough that a single datapoint doesn’t skew the results — and mushing (that’s the technical term) them all together to get a value of “Zeitgeistiness” (another technical term) for each content object.

But — and this is the important bit — each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blogposts against other Technology blogposts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into consideration: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/section also published on Mondays. Because we’ve been storing and analysing this data overnight for a while now, we’ve got a good baseline to work from.

It’s early days for the Zeitgeist experiment, and I’m afraid it’s rather buried away from most visitors to the site, so it will be hard for them to see how popular the idea plays out compared to the regular ‘most-read/commented/shared’ widget. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting project that shows how news organisations might protect their brand at the same time as playing to the cheap seats.

picture credit: Joi

I mentioned this a couple of posts back. Delete discusses ‘The Virtues of Forgetting in the Digital Age’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend but the RSA has — as always — made the audio of the talk available to everyone. See the link below for details.

Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyber-space for future employers to see. The written word made it possible for us to remember across generations and time, yet now digital technology is overriding our natural ability to forget. Should the past be ever-present, ready to be on-screen at the click of a mouse?
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, director of the information and innovation policy research centre at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, explains why current information rights and privacy fixes can’t help us, and proposes a simple solution - expiration dates on information.

RSA Event Page Here

According to a study by counsellors at Purdue University, “1/3 of employers screen job candidates using search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. 11.5 percent look through social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga for the profiles of job candidates.” This practice is only going to increase as employers become more aware of how much information can actually be obtained online. As digital natives move from trainsurfing to applying for accountancy degrees, the detritus of their online past could become quite harmful.

But thoroughly respectable adults also have reason to be concerned. Garlik’s co-founder Tom Ilube told me of his surprise at finding floorplans of his house on his local council’s website following an application for permission to build an extension. Nothing to hide there, but do you really want that sort of thing to be in the public domain without your permission? According to Ilube, the time is right for a mass-market privacy service as the general public start to become aware of just how much data about them is being stored online. The growing problem of identity theft — more than 100,000 britons were affected last year according to Garlik, at a cost of £1.7bn — is also addressed by the service.

It will be interesting to see how successful they are at actually delivering what they promise. After reading of people’s difficulties in simply having negative or incorrect Wikipedia profiles deleted, I have to be a little sceptical.