Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontier

The Wild Wild Web - How it became so and what you need to know and do to protect your online and real world reputation

Michael Fertik and David Thompson's WILD WEST 2.0 traces the history of the internet from its roots in the ARPA Net with Defense Department and college and university researchers sharing and collaborating plain text data files with each other to today's no holds barred anything goes world wild web. The book outlines the honor, integrity, and chivalry of the academic researchers and government employees that worked together to share data and information with each other in the early days of the internet. For many of us that got our start on the Advanced Research Products Agency Network and Defense Data Network (ARPA Net and DDN), the intended use and the shared rules we lived by were well understood and generally followed (although some have been found later to have been using the technology for personal not professional use).
In the early to mid-90s, we were horrified to discover that our internal and sometimes sensitive pre-publication research documents, data, and information were being readily accessed by the public with a 14K baud modem and a web browser like National Center for Supercomputing Applications Mosaic or Netscape and through the indexing power of the Digital Equipment Corporation's AltaVista Search engine. In a forerunner to "The Google Truth" that the authors discuss, AltaVista results also brought back less than authoritative or non-flattering information that was not intended to be shared in public. Back in the day, there were unwritten rules that gave people whose information had been purloined or whose reputation had been impugned a means to remediate or mitigate the offense. Today, not even public laws protect individual rights, privacy, reputation, or property. Life, liberty, truth, justice, and the American way are not safe with anonymous character assassins and thieves operating in a in a global, virtual world wild web with essentially no rules, no sheriff and no justice system that can penetrate the dark shadows from which they operate.
Fertik and Thompson outline a strategy for those that wish to live in the public domain (tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking is a choice) and for those that hope to live quiet, private lives far removed from the obsession with social networking that seems to consume so much time in "everyone's" day. The bottom line is that it takes work to watch your own back. Public records are researched and compiled into services that - for a fee - allow anyone to get more information about you than you probably knew yourself. Monitoring your own image is important - - even for the non-public semi-private person.
The hard choice is to go proactive. For companies and small businesses, this is a must. For people that plan to live their virtual lives on Facebook, Twitter, etc., this too is a must. The strategies outlined in this book are the basics that public personas have to implement for basic reputation defense purposes. When harmed, the authors recommend bringing in the professionals. Some things can be fixed - - others only mitigated. In addition, in the worst case - - if the culprit can be found - - legal action is the final recourse to character assassination by the "truth" rendered by search engine algorithms.
This book is a must read for anyone concerned about their identity and reputation in the real and virtual world.

Informed report on protecting your reputation online

Although the Internet is the greatest information resource and connectivity medium the world has ever seen, it is still remarkably wild and woolly. Millions of shady characters inhabit it, lurking to steal your shirt and sell it back to you at twice the original price. Some online con artists set up phony rating sites where they publish scathing reviews of companies' products and then extort heavy fees from those firms to remove the negative reviews. Malevolent liars use the Internet anonymously to ruin people's reputations or corporations' standings with blog attacks and negative postings. Reputation management consultants Michael Fertik and David Thompson examine these fraudulent activities and more in this disturbing but timely book, and they outline steps you can take to protect your online reputation or the good name of your business. Though the book is somewhat repetitive, Fertik and Thompson have created a solid, useful manual on safeguarding your good name online. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who has to fight back against online slurs, and to anyone who has a good reputation and wants to keep it.

No text was provided for this review.