I remember the first time I heard about someone ending a relationship via email. It was a long time ago (like, in the nineties) and possibly in the days before I had an email account of my own. Everyone was shocked at how someone could bring themselves to do something like that online. Now, such a break-up would constitute a gross lack of inventiveness.

Why not edit a Wikipedia entry instead? This extreme example of immaturity and horrendous reputation management was played out in front of the Wikipedia and Valleyway-reading world this week. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales apparently used Wikipedia to end his relationship with the delightful Rachel Marsden, a right-wing political commentator from Canada. Upon learning of Wales' actions, Marsden dragged some of his dirty laundry (no, literally) over to eBay and put it up for sale. Valleywag, who initially picked up the story, lives for this sort of thing.

Nice, yes? All class, there. This is an extreme example of people purposefully embarrassing themselves, but it highlights the difficulty many people seem to have with managing their reputations. While the traditional ten blue-on-white links in Jimmy Wales' Google SERP are still relatively generic as of 10pm PST today, blended search adds a little sting in the SERP's tail with some choice news and blog search results about the incident at the top and bottom of the page.



One assumes that these results will update frequently; however, they add a facet to reputation management that no one has dealt with before. I used to joke about how great it was when unflattering things were said about me and the author misspelled my last name (there is no "e" in Copland!). It's not quite such a joke when news and blog search results show up in one of the two results pages the general public really uses. So keep on misspelling my name if you don't like me, please.

What a bore I am, sitting here saying, "they should have known better." I should have known better every time I made a snarky comment here or on some other blog. Maybe Wales and Marsden will look back on this and think, "Wow, that wasn't exactly good publicity for me, was it?" I've certainly learned my lesson about the things I do online and I now like to refer to Point # Two in my recent SEO-Chicks post whenever I notice that I'm in imminent danger of making a (searchable) fool of myself.

Quite simply, it strikes me as odd that anyone would wish to taint their reputations with actions like these. While I understand that everyone says silly things when they're angry, if I can learn the above Point # 2, everyone can. Jimmy Wales' personal blog currently states:

Over the last few days, a few gossip websites have decided that my personal life is somehow of interest to people and, against my wishes, are publicizing details about a brief relationship I had with Rachel Marsden.

Jimmy, you founded Wikipedia; you must be well aware that you are at least an interesting public figure, if not a Silicon Valley celebrity. Similarly, Rachel Marsden used to work for Fox News and was thus also completely aware of the publicity her actions would incur. To me, her eBay listing seems quite calculated, but still vindictive and not the actions of someone who is looking out for her long-term online reputation.

Online, as in "real life," you have to make a very conscious decision about what you want to be public and what you'd rather keep private. By private, I mean completely untraceable: do not think that the pictures you upload to Facebook can't be accessed by search engines, because many Facebook users (who needn't be your friends on the site) can link directly to the Jpeg file from anywhere, inadvertently making it rank for anything, including your name. Oops.