The company cautioned that malware gangs have become adept users of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is the science/art of trying to get certain listings to appear higher up on search results pages than others.  Since most people tend to click on one of the top of the list search terms, the higher your ranking on the page, the more likely it is you’ll be discovered.  Quicker discovery leads to increased traffic to your page.
Let’s say Dave Graveline’s newsletter is ranked higher on a search engine like Google than Dave Graveline’s Auto Repair site. The benefit to our Dave Graveline is that he gets more clicks because his page rank would be closer to the top of the heap.

Here’s one way that the wrong folks have been using SEO to their advantage. If Bill Clinton has a medical problem or Tiger Woods decides to offer his mea culpa, you can expect that people are going to search out further news.  Sophisticated malware gangs, savvy to the power of news, know that people will use Google as their main conduit to read more.  There are some variations on the theme: Some create fake destinations that ask for credentials, others have created websites that lead users to a fake message about having been infected with a virus. The message urges them to download new virus protection software in order to clean up things.  The anti-virus software is really a malware program in disguise.  In other words, Internet users just doing an ordinary search or reading online news cane be infected.

According to a note from Avast’s director of Anti-Virus Research, Jindrich Kubec: “This refined methodical approach to SEO manipulation and attack is increasingly popular and likely to keep working unless end users suddenly smarten up and change their willingness to visit unknown or questionable sites, or security firms can work more closely with Google.”

Interestingly page rankings are not just used by malware gangs, they’re used every day by major organizations like the Huffington Post too.  If Huffington notices an unusual spike in traffic to Taylor Swift’s website, they’re ready to fire up their addition to the story.  SEO has been a mixed bag of use and abuse.

What’s to be done?  After following the events of the past weeks I see two possible ways to alleviate some of the problem.  As consumers, don’t let Goggle do the driving.  If you want to see how Bill Clinton is faring with his new stent, then go directly to CNN, The New York Times, or your site of reckoning.  Not foolproof, but it diminishes the odds.  In other words, be proactive about where you go on the web and rely on Google less.

At the same time, Google should be making sure that page rankings have some credibility.  Working with worldwide anti-virus companies to alert them (all equally) regarding abuses and use issues is one of the critical steps in deterring attacks and malicious behavior.  Google has some education available for those interested in optimizing searches on their websites, but getting it to take a larger responsibility for its role as the keeper of page-rankers is a necessity, growing more immediate by the day.

Disclosure:  I spent a day as a guest of Avast’s corporate offices in Prague where some of these techniques were described.

As I thought about legacy I started to think about legacy products.

Here’s an obvious one. Legacy Locker is what it says it is, a locker for your digital assets. This is sort of like digital equivalent of an online safety deposit box. You can specify a beneficiary to have access to your digital assets in the event that you die or become incapacitated.

The beneficiaries aren’t permitted any access until they show up with a death certificate or some certificate proving that you can no longer manage your accounts.  This is not a sexy product, but it’s an important one.  And it’s not a bad deal, especially since you’re walked through how to name people, compose legal letters, upload and download. You can store everything from passwords, to access codes to music and photos. The only limiting factor is your pocketbook. There are full featured offerings for  $29.99 per year, or $299.99 for a lifetime subscription. A trial version with limited features is available for free.

Fast Pencil is a legacy of a different entirely color.  The youngsters may be busy living life, but older folks are busy sorting out these blasts from the past and letting their creative juices fly into Act II.  Boomers are the heaviest users of self publishing software; they’ve got lots to say and more time to say it.

Some publishing programs like Blurb (Blurb can create extraordinarily beautiful photographic books. Lulu, another self publishing program prides itself on creating speedy printed books on demand.  A new program I looked at last week,  Fast Pencil  is not dissimilar. It provides templates and typefaces and editing tools to get your printed pages to behave. What it gives you that the others don’t is a social network. Bookwriting no longer needs to be classified as a lonely task,  The social media part is the fun part – if you like collaboration that is

Researching your family history?  Why go it alone. Get them all involved, Comment, Edit . Set up chapters.  Putting together a family cookbook?  A travel book?  It turns out that Fast Pencil is a great way to manage group collaborations.  The site is also building a network of supporting talents whos work is for hire,  Need a graphic artist? Special typography?  Copy Editor, — the entire publishing community is invited to swap gifts. A recently launched addition to the product is called Color Book Creator (which has nothing to do with coloring books)  lets you import photos and illustrations into your book.  Even if only your five BFFs and three relatives buy a book you’ve created a legacy.

Organizations like WiredSafety, FOSI, getNetWise, NetSmartz, Pause, Play Parents, and Common Sense Media are all committed to helping parents understand the dangers of the Internet, offering tips, advice, and survey data. Sometimes the messages are the same, sometimes not. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FCC are just a few of the government agencies that have their hands in the Internet safety pie, too. And the Internet safety industry has grown its own brand of celebrity: John Walsh, Parry Aftab, Donna Rice Hughes, and others who have been delivering the safety stump speech for over 20 years each.
For years, Internet safety messaging was based on fear. Fear of predators coercing children to meet them in the real world. Fear of adults soliciting our children for various forms of online sex. These issues have not gone away, but it turns out that while predatory problems are the headline makers, they are not the most frequent problems.

Today’s Internet problems are more nuanced and require a more nuanced approach to safety. The groups that “get it” are shifting away from the scare tactics and looking at ways to help kids protect themselves (often from themselves). Sexting, cyberbullying, and sharing of private information are the activities that are more likely to occur on a daily basis.

What will it take to bring Internet safety advocates into modern times?

1. Recognize the ubiquity of the Internet: We’re not just talking about protecting your PC any longer. Mobile phones, game machines, handheld devices, music services–these are all equal opportunities for predatory behavior.
2. Involve the hardware manufacturers: Fostering a culture of responsibility and awareness takes the efforts of all involved. Companies like Verizon, Disney, Microsoft, and AOL have all played a part in shaping the Internet safety environment. Conspicuously absent in the conversation are the hardware folks. Giving kids tools like smartphones, PCs, and netbooks demands that their makers have a stake in the process too.
3. Get the schools on the program: Recognizing that Internet skills are arguably the most important skills to cultivate for today’s students, schools should be doing much more to incorporate best practices. Computer ethics, codes of conduct, and other Internet behaviors should be part of the curriculum. Use of social networking and other popular technologies should be incorporated into academia so that kids can have good role models for how to use the technology.
4. Disclose funding and consolidate: When it comes to Internet safety we may have too much of a good thing. The sheer number of sites and bloggers devoted to keeping kids safe detracts from the message. A bit of consolidation would be beneficial. At minimum, sites should state where their funding comes from since funding sources can certainly affect the tone of a site.
5. Get kids involved in dialogue: Creating Internet savvy kids means including them in the conversation. Everyone knows that when kids learn from other kids, with humble opinion instead of dictum, the message is likely to create a deeper impression.
6. Be a role model: Parents who steal music and software, or are flippant about their own privacy and security on the web reinforce the notion that the web is the not subject to societal laws.
7. Create a national program: We ask kids to take a test to prove that they’re ready to get behind the wheel, and many states have implemented graduated licenses where you earn driving privileges (like driving at night) one at a time. Learning to navigate the Internet is at least as important as learning to drive a car, so maybe there’s something to be learned from the driver’s license model.

As our PCs and our emails hold more and more of our most intimate musings, and as boomers face mortality, the question of how to treat our online lives in the afterlife is a big one. I hear more and more stories of loved ones who die leaving their memories online and inaccessible to their families and friends.

I first looked into what happens to your online accounts after you die in 2006. Most websites were completely clueless, way too concerned with the here and now to worry about future problems.

Today, Facebook has a very clear policy about death. You can decide to memorialize the deceased profile (certain features, like status updates are shut off), which keeps the site viewable but frozen in time, or you can have the site deactivated (which doesn’t remove the contents). What Facebook doesn’t do (at least not without a big fuss) is release the deceased’s log-on information.

That means, unless they’re willing to fight, your family may be unable to use the site—say for contacting your friends with an update. Or finding out who your friends were or, in some cases, even how you might have died. LinkedIn, MySpace, and others have similar policies. You can have an account memorialized (on MySpace) or removed completely, but don’t count on being able to access the contents.

Planning for the Afterlife

Given these policies, like most death-related issues, the best thing you can do is to start thinking about your digital legacy while you’re still alive. Public radio recently ran a story about the legal wrangling of getting access to a deceased family member’s password. The broadcast identified Legacy Locker, a new website that lets you bequeath your online properties as a solution.

Other alternatives involve simple common sense, low-tech solutions.

1. Give your passwords to a trusted family member—an envelope that gets stored in a desktop drawer until needed is the lowest tech way to protect your legacy.
2. Don’t trust the keepers? Provide a list of passwords and account information to your attorney or executor. Ask that your will be modified to include a statement about what happens to your online persona.
3. Lock up your passwords in a vault to be opened in the event of your death. Leave specific instructions as to how to use these accounts.

If you think I’m just finding things to worry about, then think about this. According to a recent census of social media users, 3.24% of all Facebook users were actually dead. Dead MySpace users trumped Facebook at 7.46%. That’s a lot of souls floating around in social networking purgatory.

Verbally abuse someone on a social network? That gets noted in your score. A good customer who pays on time? That gets noted as well. Does it seem like an Internet version of a shopkeepers’ association or is it more like the scarlet letter? As most things on the web, ReputationShare will probably turn out to be a combination of both.

The good news is that Internet sites and shops need to clean up their establishments and ReputationShare provides some good tools. Web businesses suffer from name callers, kooks, spammers, and scammers as much as any individual storefront in the real world. Real world shops have learned to deal with psychopathic customers; why shouldn’t Internet sites do the same?

Here’s how it works. The website decides to join ReputationShare. Upon registration at the site, users are tracked and their incidents (both good and bad) show up on a report. The scores are algorithmically translated into a single reputation score that the site owners can share collectively and take appropriate action as individual sites.

Of course, the big brother conspirators will have a field day with this. And perhaps they should. While it’s nice to know whether someone is a spammer or abusive online, an unanticipated result may be to inspire some vigilante behaviors. Barring a known thief from a website is one thing; barring the voice of an irate customer who makes disparaging remarks is dangerous. What’s to stop the sites from looking for retaliatory purposes? Lots of questions, but ReputationShare has some pretty good answers. They don’t divulge any personal identities; each person in the database has a “hashed” number attached to them—no names. And the system is transparent, which means you have as much right to view your reputation score as they do.

eBay had one of the earliest reputation systems on the web. Shoppers either praised or panned storekeepers based on their experiences. That information was shared with the entire eBay community. Stores and sites will be able to reward their best customers, maybe through expanded services, or punish their less desirable by making them a persona non grata.

Linda Criddle, the site’s founder, is no stranger to the threats of the Internet. A 13-year Microsoft veteran, she was a pioneer in the company’s Internet safety efforts as well as the author of numerous books on Internet safety. Criddle says her approach keeps privacy intact, but makes actions on the web have consequences.

To read a short white paper http://www.reputationshare.com/ReputationShareWhitePaper.pdf.

Sexting involves kids using cellphones and/or webcams to transmit naked or provocative images of themselves to friends and/or posting them on the Internet. Parents, all too aware of the risk-taking/impetuous behavior of youth, are terrified of what might happen when their in-the-moment child meet the world’s largest, fastest megaphone—the Internet.

But parents should be soul searching a bit deeper. Ask yourself whether you are more concerned with the fact that your child decided to share a nude photo or apoplectic from the fear that the photo might fall into the wrong hands—a teacher, college admissions staff, or even the entire Internet. Parents who fear the aftershock of a sexting incident more than the act itself may be missing the point.

Risk-taking, impetuousness, and a lack of self-esteem probably lie at the heart of what motivates a young person to sext. I think of it as an Internet-age game of Truth of Dare. The less daring will strike a flirtatious pose in a bra and panties; the more daring will go all the way. Just as with teen sex in the real world, sexting is the manifestation of a problem, not the problem. Playing devil’s advocate, I’ve even argued that experimenting with your sexuality using technology carries a lot less risk than being promiscuous in the real world.

Is Sexting a Felony?

While it’s up to parents to look for the underlying reasons to sext, it’s up to the courts to decide just how much of a crime it should be for kids to pass lewd or unseemly photos to each other. Unfortunately, some incidents have been treated as felonies.

Earlier this month a Florida boy was arrested for sexting after he sent a photo of his 16-year-old girlfriend posing naked to a bunch of her friends and family. The 18-year-old boy, in a moment of anger (he claimed that a boyfriend/girlfriend fight was the impetus for the sexting), earned a place on the sex offenders registry. He’ll remain on the list until he’s 43. Sending a photo of a naked 16-year-old constitutes child pornography in the eyes of the law. Equally disturbing, a 14-year-old New Jersey girl was arrested for posting nude pictures of herself on MySpace. Posting one’s own photo constitutes child pornography as well.

Other states have shown more tolerance for the follies of youth. In Pennsylvania, students involved in distributing photos of female classmates could have all charges against them dropped if they’d agree to participate in a sexual harassment seminar. The majority did. In Ohio, a 15-year-old high school girl faced charges for sending racy cellphone photos of herself to classmates. She eventually agreed to a curfew, no cellphone, and supervised Internet usage. And in Vermont, they’re trying to pass legislation so that sexting would not be considered a felony, though it will still be considered illegal. Should kids be treated as felons for sexting?

Smart Thoughts on Sexting

On Good Morning America, Parry Aftab recently held a sexting summit for parents and teens to discuss the reasons for sexting, the danger it poses, and some parental tips for to spot trouble.

Over at Ars Technica, the author reviews a controversial study finding that 20% of teens said that they’d put nude photos of themselves online. The full text of the study can be found at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the survey’s sponsors. Ann Collier’s report on the sexting trend offers a good overview. Anastasia Goodstein’s column asks us not to blow the sexting situation out of proportion. Salon’s Broadsheet reminds parents that it is inevitable that someday their kids are going to bare all, either on or off the web.

Asking Nicely

One of the best ways to manage your reputation is to show up and have your case heard. Asking people to stop saying what they’re saying, apologizing for things you’ve said, clarifying misconstrued statements…these are things we’ve been doing in the real world since the spoken word began.

When people hurl the first things that come out of their mouths into a note, a simple reminder that the recipient is a living, breathing, feeling human being often helps. Giving a body to the disembodied voices of the web brings civility back into the equation. “I’m sorry,” “my mistake,” and “I didn’t mean to cause you grief” are terms that are in short supply on the Internet.

As a blogger (who incidentally finds that being wrong generates the most traffic), I’ve apologized for making mistakes, confronted those who don’t care for my ideas, and tried very hard not to be offensive. Sometimes it’s hopeless. But nine of out 10 times you establish a personal relationship with the enemy and move on.

Reporting a Problem

Your next recourse would be to report a problem to your service provider. Most have a “report problems” button. If it’s easily verified that there’s something wrong going on, the service provider will attempt to suspend, if not cancel, the troublemaker’s account. If complaints from a number of sources trickle in, it’s more likely the complaint will be addressed.

The Legal Route

Of course, there are legal options to seek compensation when someone says something you feel is untrue and harmful. Hard enough to prove in the real world, these libel cases are almost impossible to win in cyberspace. In part that’s because you can quickly defend yourself and correct the record on the Internet, and in part because the courts are likely to play ostrich when it comes to libel rulings on the web. A simple explanation of libel, easy enough for non-lawyers to digest, comes from Larry Lessig’s blog. (He’s a professor and Internet law specialist at Stanford.)

The Reputation Scrubbers

Now to the juiciest part of reputation management. A cross between a personal private eye and a personal vigilante, these are new services that combine the good old craft of PR and spin with search and linking technologies.

Reputation Hawk, ReputationDefender, and International Reputation Management are three of the leading sites that attempt to fix their clients’ sullied profiles. How do they do that? They flood the web with good content, drowning the bad. And they cross-link favorable content in order to get the good stuff to appear higher in a web search.

Just like in the real world, where reputations can be fixed for a price using a PR firm, there’s bound to be a skewing of reality. Case in point: I spoke with Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, after he helped spin Sue Scheff’s web situation into gold. Scheff, who runs an educational consulting firm that places troubled teens in residential programs, recently won $11.3 million from the Florida courts. Scheff sued a woman named Carey Brock, a disgruntled customer who expressed her displeasure by posting complaints about Scheff’s services. The posts called Scheff a crook and fraud.

If you aren’t following this case you should be. It’s a clear example of how those with the money can manipulate their reputations. Some commentators believe Scheff is a heroine who stood up against Internet falsehoods to emerge victorious. A few voices rally behind Brock as a consumer without the media savvy to sway the court, but as a woman who simply wanted to warn others about what she considered terrible business practices.

The only certainty is that Scheff is litigious. She recently took action against another website whose owner took the name Sueschefftruth.com as a way of criticism. You can follow along at Topix with its recap, or straight from the horse’s mouth at Sue Scheff’s site.

The Scheff story is troubling. I wrote a note to ReputationDefender’s Michael Fertik a few months back:

“It’s one thing to write a nice ‘cease and desist’ letter to the person or site that’s giving you agita; it’s another thing to populate the web with verbiage and links in an attempt to tip the search scales. You are not alone in providing these services and, in fact, you may be the most honest of them, but you are still using the Internet to manipulate the truth.”

I’ve lived it. A few years back I made a dumb business decision and it’s still there, haunting me each time I Google my name. Most of what was written was not true, but that hardly matters. It hurt me personally and professionally and still does to this day.

As we put more of ourselves out there on the Internet, we’re going to be hearing a lot about the growing science (or is it art?) of reputation management. Reputation management consists of two parts. First, you’ll want to track what people are saying about you (your company, your employees, your product, your children). Next, you’ll want to take the appropriate action if your online reputation is being sullied. That’s the tougher part.

Tracking Your Reputation

The first steps are the easiest. There are a number of programs that let you see what’s being said on the Internet by tracking a specific word—like your own name. A Google search will bring up your name, but to automate the process you can use Google News Alerts. Just enter your name, company name, or any other term you want to track in the news and if it comes up on the web you’ll receive an email. Lots of false positives and misses, but it’s really easy.

From there, tracking tools get more granular. If you blog you’ll want to monitor where your work or words show up on blogs. It’s advisable to register at a site like Technorati. They keep a sort of uber-list of blogs and can search for mentions of whatever it is that you’re tracking across thousands of blogs. If you want to track comments about your blogs you’ll use a different tool.

For the top 10 free tools to track stuff on the web, read this Mashable post.

If less choice is more, then stick to the five free tools discussed on the Personal Branding Blog.

And, if you want too much information about how you should be thinking about your reputation in cyberspace, you can read 100 tips from criminal justice.

Next, we’ll look at the hairier, thornier issue of what to do when bad things are said about good people (like you).

While the consumers were slowly waking up to the fact that their TVs would go dark, the TV stations were chomping at the bit to pull the switch. The stations have been investing in new digital towers, in educating their viewers, and in advertising and preparing for the switch for years. That’s the reason that over 400 stations have ignored the delay and have already transitioned to a digital-only signal. The bill that was passed, which specified the delay, offered stations that wanted to go digital a chance to do it earlier if they had FCC permission. As of this week, about 25% of the nation’s broadcast stations were granted permission and have launched their digital programming. Consumers who are waiting until the June cutoff date are going to have to catch up on the favorite programs they’ve missed. With some stations switching and some waiting, we’ve got digital TV anarchy.

One report says that four million customers are still waiting for their $40 government-funded coupons to help pay for their digital transition. A Nielson study found that five million Americans are not ready for the transition to digital. The highest number of unprepared live in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area. Hawaii, on the other end of the spectrum, went ahead and managed a statewide switch well in advance of any national cutoff date. Maybe trying to change the entire country’s TV infrastructure on one day was silly idea from the onset? Perhaps a more regional rollout would have been more sensible? As it stands, we’ve got digital TV anarchy. Anarchy usually winds up costing us all in one way or another. We may need to start looking at a DTV bailout before we’re through.

Confused about which of your favorite stations jumped the deadline?

On the government-sponsored DTV Transition website the following notice appears:

Some of the TV stations in the US will transition from analog to digital broadcasting on Feb 17th. The remaining stations will transition from analog to digital broadcasting between Mar 14th and Jun 12th.

AARP (877-698-806) and the FCC (1-800-CALL-FCC) have both set up hotlines to get you through.