Entries from March 2009 ↓

If you thought that untagged photos of you on Facebook were not going to affect your online reputation, you’ve got another thing coming. According to the New York Times, a new application utilizes facial recognition software to find public, untagged photos online.

From the page:

This one is kinda scary because of how well it works. Face.com’s new Photo Finder application for Facebook helps you automatically discover public photos that you and your friends may have forgotten to tag — and it also lets you track untagged photos of your friends.

Face-recognition technology is itself not new, but Photo Finder’s twist is how it makes use of Facebook’s interface. The social network only shows you photos of yourself containing tags about you — your name and profiled, associated with you in a given photo. Up until now, untagging a photo is how you hide a photo from your Facebook friends — the other option is to use more advanced privacy settings that restrict photo viewing to specific friends, but I’m not sure how many people use that feature.

With Face.com, your friends can bypass such social engineering to directly stalk you, or visa versa as the case may be.

[SNIP]

More than 850 million photos are uploaded every month by Facebook’s 200 million or so users. So if this app becomes popular, expect a surge in the number of these photos that people choose hide behind the more advanced privacy setting. I’m guessing that college students coming back from spring break, for example, might think harder about making a new album like “Beach Party Spring Break 09″ available to just a few friends or a network — but not moms or ex-girlfriends.

As technology continues to advance, it will be incumbent on social networkers to monitor and maintain a consistent online reputation.

ReputationDefender and our CEO, Michael Fertik, were recently featured on NPR’s On the Media. He spoke informatively about the nature of online reputation and how identity is affected in the digital era. You can listen to the piece in our audio player below.

Yesterday it was announced that Google has gone all language-y on the web, updating its algorithms to understand not only the words being searched, but also the relationship between words. This is known as search semantics, and it is Google’s newest attempt to impress the web public with relevant search results.

Aside from the new word-relationship component, Google has also increased the characters devoted to summary paragraphs that attempt to pin down what people are searching for. In a recent blog post Google search quality team technical lead Ori Allon and snippets team engineer Ken Wilder wrote that the company “[is] deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search. We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know.”

Heretofore Internet search services have focused on matching key words typed into query boxes with words at websites or in other online data. The newest generation of Internet users has caused a rise in demand for semantic searches that go beyond matching words to actually understanding what sentences or combinations of words mean. The trick, from a company stand point, has been whether or not adequate technology can be developed to process the increasingly complex searches with the high speed that Internet users have come to expect.

Not content with their current position behind Google in terms of search, Microsoft has recently stated that it is testing a Kumo.com semantic search engine. The hope is that the new search technology will be more popular than Microsoft’s current Live Search service, catapulting it beyond Yahoo! and Google.

As of Tuesday Google has rolled out semantic search capabilities in 37 languages. Some examples given by Wilder and Allon included a search in Russian for “fortune-telling with cards” which brought up search results for “tarot” and “divination.” Conversely, a Google search in English for “principles of physics” generated suggestions about “big bang” and “quantum mechanics.”

Keen (or tech wonky, take your pick) folks have recently noted that Twiter has gone all SEO on us. Twitter, it seems, has optimized its title tags. This could turn out to make Twitter an instant SEO tool, launching people to the top of Google.

While this author hasn’t seen much change in his Google profile with the Twitter tweak, it is only a matter of time before Google re-indexes the profile page, which should shove it up a little bit. New users, especially businesses, will feel the larger ramifications of this little move by Twitter. In essence, open a Twitter account get a spot in the top 10 (page one) of a Google search. Not bad. There are a ton of SEO companies that would love to have such a sure fire tool at their finger tips, and now, well, they do. Other social media companies are adopting this approach, Facebook among them. The end result is more personal branding for individuals, and easier corporate branding for companies. Instead of having to commit to time and labor intensive approaches like blogs and forums, people will find the easiest, most effective way to secure those results, be it Twitter or some other service.

We spend a lot of time on the ReputationDefender Blog talking about how inappropriate social networking can end up costing you your job, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any value to joining these sites. When used correctly, professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn allow you to show off your accomplishments and make hundreds of useful industry connections that can help you find jobs later in your career.

As detailed in this article from the Charlotte Observer, more people than ever are turning to the Internet to get a leg-up on their competition.

From the article:

As the recession continues to squeeze professionals, pushing unemployment to record highs and flooding the job market with qualified candidates, more job-hunters are turning to the Internet. Now, more companies and recruiters are mining the sites for candidates, too – and more than ever, experts say, a profile on an online networking site could actually turn into a job.

“It’s almost like networking on steroids,” said Jenny Smith of career coaching firm Right Management in Charlotte. “You can meet so many people in a short time.”

Using the Internet to search for jobs isn’t a new idea. Sites dedicated to job-hunting such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com have been around for about a decade. But as social and professional sites are growing in popularity, so is the practice of using them to find work, career coaches and recruiters say.

Facebook, one of the best-known social networking sites, says it has more than 175 million members.

LinkedIn, a networking site with 37 million members worldwide, has seen connections jump 26 percent in the last month and double in the last year, spokeswoman Krista Canfield said.

Job searches were up 48 percent last month from a year ago, and over the last six months, the number of applicants per job listing on the site has doubled, she said.

The article goes on to explain how companies are branching out into the social networking sphere to actively recruit talent.

More companies and recruiters are catching on, she said. While “innovative” companies, like Internet startups, might seem more likely to recruit through social and professional sites, large accounting firms and even government agencies are perusing online profiles, too, she said.

A large health insurance company recruited 10 percent of its new hires through LinkedIn, Smith said. At Right Management, of 12 people who landed jobs recently, 40 percent did so through networking sites, Smith’s colleague Karen Schuler said.

Of course, having a strong presence online is only the first step in finding a job. It is also important to actively seek out potential connections and engage the online community in a way that differentiates you from the crowd. It doesn’t hurt to have strong face-to-face networking skills either.

If you’re unsure of how to begin promoting your good name online, you can always turn to the experts here at ReputationDefender. As the global leader in online reputation management, we have the experience and knowledge to help anyone control their image online. To see the kind of results we’ve produced for our clients, check out these ReputationDefender Testimonials.