Cleaning Up Your Online Reputation

Many people have posted things online, or made inappropriate comments quoted on someone else's blog, and later regretted it. The conventional wisdom is that once something goes online, it's forever online.

But help is available, according to this article in Computer World, which portrays three scenarios of attempts at taking down unwanted or unflattering online material.

It isn't easy, but online reputation management experts -- a growing field these days -- like ReputationDefender and ReputationHawk, is decidedly low-tech -- try to get to the human being owning the online material and call them.

So, why hire a service when you can just get on the phone yourself to a blog author or ISP? The services can do the detective work to track down a site owner and then handle all the leg work from there. They're the professionals. They do this all the time, while you might only have to do it once.