While checking on who was reading a post written last week, I spotted a significant number of reads coming from  selling “reputation management.”  This is their pitch:

Your Inoculation Campaigns will benefit from years of knowledge and experience, not trial-and-error guesswork. All work is checked for high quality and summarized in easy-to-read Monthly Reports.

Inoculation focuses on suppressing negative listings by surrounding them with positive, authoritative listings.

We will gladly Inoculate one or more keyphrases by creating Micro-Sites, Blogs and various Social Media sites; we can also create and submit Press Releases and Syndicated Articles to our successful networks. We constantly check the progress of our work by analyzing Search Engine Rankings for the keyphrases we are Inoculating and report the progress to you on a continual basis.

Inoculation campaigns is an interesting way to put it.  As if negative information is a disease, a cancer spreading across the internet.   There is no question but that false, malicious information is so easily spread by any nutjob or disgruntled person with a keyboard.  Gruntled people have keyboards too, but tend not to have the zeal of their “dis-ed” counterparts.

The flip side is that there are similar legitimate complaints and criticisms, defining legitimate as truly held beliefs.  They may be no more accurate or realistic than the malicious ones, as there are computer users with strange sensibilities and bizarre expectations of others, or they may be absolutely fair and accurate. 

The point of reputation management is that no matter what the source of negative information, whether legitimate or totally wacky, a niche has developed for those with hours weeks years of knowledge and experience in making it go away.  This points to the immutable characteristic of the internet.  For the good that exists, alongside exists a fabric of lies, artfully created to harm or help.  But absolutely, total, complete lies.

When you look to find out whether to buy an item, say a TV, from one company or another, do you immediately check out the reviews online?  When your kids to their homework, do they rush to the internet to get answers?  Is that where they’re getting medical advice, sex education or political news? 

When I began writing, there was a rigorous threat that if you promoted something stupid or deceitful, someone would call you out on it and, more often than not, rip your head off for it.  You could immediately be revealed as a pariah, moron or liar, knowing that there was always someone who would scrutinize your words for their integrity and accuracy. This kept us honest.

Gone.  Forget the Happysphere gang, a relatively benign group who wants only to be left alone to promote themselves without anyone challenging their self-aggrandizement or ignorance.  They may be a part of the problem, creating and perpetuating ignorance and dishonesty, but they are keeping it within their own borders.  For the most part, they signify nothing, as thoughtful people recognize them as mere vapid noise and ignore them.

Reputation management is entirely different, systematically and aggressively serving the interests of their paying clients.  Their clients may have good reason to try to cleanse their online reputation of false and malicious information, or they may do just the opposite, cleanse the internet of truthful and accurate information about bad people and companies. 

The nagging problem is whether one can function within this morass of lies and deception comfortably.  There are some folks who have adopted the isolationist view, that they can hide their head in the sand, do whatever it is they do within their chosen medium and ignore everything else happening online.  This requires a person to believe that they can sit on the curb and still avoid being soiled by others splashing around in the gutter.  Everybody gets dirty, whether they deserve to or not.

Some people have developed a reputation for honesty, at least within certain parameters.  Their reputation doesn’t mean much to new people who happen to stumble onto a website or blog, not knowing whether they’re good or evil and having little clue whether they are much admired or wholly ignored.  If they want to ascertain the value of information obtained by happenstance, they can always do a search.  But will they come up with critical analysis or reputation management?

Even reputation legitimately developed over time may serve to be misleading.  There are a few blawgers who were once highly regarded, but whose practices aren’t doing very well and have devolved into marketing sluts.  Some are smart, and their self-promotional efforts aren’t as clumsy or flagrant as others, so that readers may not realize that they are being deceived or manipulated. 

Yesterday, I had lunch with the anonymous Editor of Blawg Review, who griped because I don’t have him on my blawg roll.  One of the things we talked about, and which affects him every bit as much as it troubles me, is the waning substance and conversation of the blawgosphere, replaced by the promotional and stupid.  It leaves Ed without blawgers to do a half decent job of blawg review.

BR was once a “peer-reviewed carnival of blawgs.”  Now it’s become extremely difficult to find a blawger, aside from the usual suspects, who has any interest in doing the job other than for self-promotion.  Some of the recent efforts have spanned half-assed to offensively awful.  Good Blawg Reviews (forget great, which only a handful of true masters are able to achieve) have become increasingly rare. 

Whether you’re an aficionado of BR or not isn’t the point.  It is a demonstrable reflection of the vitality and value of online legal content, and the people who create it.  It’s reputation management placed in our own hands.  Do an honest job of it, put in some real effort, and have a say in your reputation.  It gives you the opportunity to shine.  It gives you the opportunity to brand yourself as a lazy, incompetent buffoon.  But it’s entirely in your own hands.

Since starting this endeavor, many of the best blawgs have disappeared. Others post sporadically, insufficient to create the synergies that once thrived. And most of the new ones are crap, self-promotional and appealing at best to simplistic children with wet-ink law degrees and the handful of nutjobs who are fascinated by the law because of their personal failures.  Some argue that there is still vitality in the blawgosphere, though their arguments are rhetorical as they can’t point to much of anything to prove their point. 

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of new blogs.  There are a ton of them. New ones appear every day, slick in appearance with plenty of bells and whistles.  Mostly, it’s a variation on reputation management.  I would ask whether this is the internet you would hope for, but the answer is that it is.  That’s why there is a niche for reputation management, to make sure that people’s carefully crafted internet personas are just the way they want them.

It’s also why the blawgosphere, a place where discussion and synergy once thrived, where people once fought to sign up to do a Blawg Review and then, if they were lucky enough to get a slot, put in a huge amount of effort to produce the best damn BR ever, has become replete with crap. 

I told Ed that I shared this concern, as I’ve got a bit of a vested interest in the blawgosphere, having spent a fairly good amount of time populating it with content, and would hate to see it fade into worthlessness.  So this is my damage control, to implore those inclined to contribute to a real discussion amongst lawyers to fight the tide of deception.  Take a risk with your reputation.  Stand for something.