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

54 Wild West 2.0

But many of those same conversations are now conducted online in

a blog or chat room, in full view of the world, automatically indexed

by Google, and broadcast to an audience of millions. Indelicate com-

ments are archived for posterity and presented by Google as if they

were as important as newspapers or government reports.

The permanence of the Internet has hit students and jobseekers

particularly hard. Those classroom notes have become MySpace

posts that are permanently archived in computers around the globe

and that are effectively impossible to delete. Pranks and insults that

might seem funny to teenagers become visible years later to employ-

ers through a simple Google search. Digital photos of the indiscre-

tions of youth are c ...