Wired is reporting today that Lori Drew, the woman involved with the creation of a phony MySpace profile that allegedly led to the suicide of Megan Meier, has been found not guilty of felony computer-hacking charges by a jury in Los Angeles. According to reports she has been convicted of three misdemeanors and the jury has deadlocked on a remaining felony charge of conspiracy.

It took the jury of six men and six women just over a day of deliberation to acquit Drew of the three felony charges of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and Tina Meier, Megan’s mother, shook her head in silence as the verdict was read aloud to the courtroom.

Lori Drew was looking at a maximum sentence of five years in prison for each felony charge against her, but jurors found her guilty only of three misdemeanors that will most likely keep her out of jail.

This has nothing to do with Online Reputation Management, but given the Thanksgiving Holiday, we thought you might be interested in how to actually deep fry a turkey.

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As we were founded by lawyers, ReputationDefender takes no responsibility for any damages, fires, burns, scrapes, explosions or food related sickness incurred from our reader’s attempts at fat frying their holiday bird.

Any readers have recipies or traditions to share in the comments?

Cracked.com is one of the best humor sites on the internet and the RepDef staff enjoys passing their links around like a bunch of hobos sharing a bottle of hooch. Recently, Cracked posted a well written piece concerning trolls, internet culture and the obscenity online anonymity engenders in the digital age. Of course, being a Cracked article, it is full of curse words and dick jokes. Puritans and readers with delicate sensibilities are advised to move along. But for all the coarse language, the underlying points brought up in the piece are prescient and penetrating. The author, David Wong, proposes a number of ways to fight online trash talking and increase the level and scope of internet comments, from anti troll apps to increased moderation to removing anonymity entirely.

The article is funny and worth a read, but perhaps the key point raised in the post is the chilling effects hate speech has on people’s online and offline behavior. Wong points out that the number of individuals participating in comments is stunted due to the hateful culture of anonymous internet speech.

Social networking is at the heart of “Web 2.0,” the future of the online world, the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter web where users create all the content and their parent companies make billions just for hosting it. It’s a pretty sweet deal.

Or it would be, if they could only convince everybody to use it. But they’re finding that lots of users will communicate online with people they know (virtually all use email and 37% use private text messaging), but only 8% use message boards or blogs or anything else that exposes them to the Internet’s assheads.

Hell, look at this site. We just had an article that was read by 305,396 unique users in a few days … but fewer than 100 of them joined the conversation down in the comments. That’s .002%, folks. It’s not that the Cracked comments are mostly retarded or nasty; it’s that for a normal person, the memory of getting called a fucktard in public even one time is striking enough to make them avoid the comments forever, even if it was accompanied by 10 non-fucktard comments. It’s human nature to remember the fucktard.

This last sentence relates to a concept ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik has advanced called “Life Censorship.” What that means is that people who suffer — often or especially at the hands of anonymous attackers — often end up censoring their lives.  They don’t participate in online discussions.  They don’t speak up in class.  They wear different clothes when they go out, or they don’t go out at at all.

Online and IRL, it is clear that trolling hatefullness affects people’s behavior. Finding ways to elevate internet culture while preserving free speech will be a big part of the evolution of digital thought.

ReputationDefender was recently mentioned in a Reader’s Digest article about online slander, cyber bullying and online gossip. The article discusses ways to fight back against the emerging trend of internet abuse amid the rising popularity of gossip sites.

Even more disgusting is how common stories like this have become. Cyberbullying of younger children, usually by other kids, is a familiar story; less so is the online harassment of college students and adults. The cowards who cloak themselves in digital anonymity to smear others are not only hurting their victims but also damaging the sense of trust important to us all, online and off. The effects can range from mere embarrassment to lost jobs to emotional trauma. Meanwhile, the creeps sitting at their keyboards are rarely held to account.

Online harassment is as old as the Web itself. But now it’s being actively encouraged by websites that profit from sourceless vitriol. Perhaps the main offender is JuicyCampus, whose home page promises that “posts are totally, 100 percent anonymous.” The website has become a clearinghouse for abuse, ranging from cruel insults and vicious rumors to the outing of gay and lesbian students and the harassment of racial and ethnic groups. How would you like to be the UCLA student who was recently branded “a stinky, ugly Jew … the most hated slut on campus”? JuicyCampus’s frequently-asked-questions page—in addition to directing users to “IP cloaking” software to further mask their digital footprint—responds to “I’m offended!” with a flip “Sorry. Also, that’s not a question.”

The piece correctly points to the CDA that means traditional protections against slander, defamation and libel are no where to be found online:

Smear someone in a traditional media outlet, like a newspaper or a talk show, and you can end up in court. But the law that Congress passed in 1996 establishing basic Internet regulations prevents website hosts from being held responsible for what outsiders post on their sites. In other words, the law says that the kind of defamation that would get the New York Times sued is fair game on JuicyCampus.

Daniel Solove, an internet reputation expert is also profiled in the well written piece.

Sure, gossip is an ugly fact of life. But the Internet has changed its impact. Gossip that used to be contained within a relatively narrow social world is now broadcast to a wider audience less able to assess its credibility, says Daniel Solove, a professor of law at George Washington University and the author of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. And even a completely false allegation can last forever online. “Now we have a kind of permanent digital scarlet letter,” says Solove.

We prize our right to free speech, but, experts like Solove say, we need to do more to protect another right: privacy.

ReputationDefender is a strong advocate of free and responsible speech and encourages individuals who suffer from internet defamation to take steps to control their online identity.

Drew Bartkiewicz has a thought provoking post over at ZDNet that looks at the new risks brands and companies are facing in the information explosion of Web 2.0. The piece is well written and worth a read. He mentions data security and risks posed by hackers and intellectual property thieves in the digital age, and also touches on ReputationDefender‘s core competency, Online Reputation Mangement.

Unlike past risks, which have been easier to identify and less fluid, online Data Privacy and Reputation liability changes day to day. This nascent area offers the insurance industry the opportunity to step up and lead the effort to protect businesses from the unseen liability associated with social media and networking so that clients can explore these new business opportunities without falling victim to the hidden risks.

Bartkiewicz mentions the insurance industry here, and ReputationDefender offers a form of Business Insurance for the Web ^TM. The author correctly notes that many businesses are unprepared to manage their brand online and have inadequate strategies to manage the risk associated with connective technology, from a security and reputation stand point.

Over the past several years, companies have been focused on e-commerce data-breach risks, such as the inadvertent or criminal disclosure of credit card and Social Security numbers. To be sure, those risks are real and continue to grow.

But Web 2.0 liability is emerging as an equal if not greater risk.

Forward thinking and agile companies will identify the need to manage their brand, and not just their data and security, online. Online Reputation Management is key for companies seeking to manage their message and connect with customers in the interactive arena.