Civility is an important asset to possess in almost any circumstance. However, this article does a good job of making the argument that the chaotic atmosphere of the Internet calls for more civility than most other situations. The Internet is a place where malcontents will destroy your reputation just for the fun of it–and you do not even have to do anything to those individuals to attract their malicious attention, so doing something to warrant their attention is pretty much just the opposite of the goal.

Online message boards have proliferated in every city and town, on campuses and even on corporate websites. And they’re typically dominated by unnamed or pseudonym-toting commentators, who often fire verbiage far over the line of civility, not to mention the legally permitted.

Reputation management experts have known about this basic principle for quite awhile, but it is good to see that others are realizing it too. The legal system, hopefully, will someday catch up to the needs of the average Internet user.

This has been a week when children or young teens could use online reputation management, that much is true. Rebecca Black is the newest personality to sweep the social networking and search industries, but it isn’t a positive development for her. Her music video, which can be found on Youtube, has been spread all across the Internet because…well…it’s awful. I won’t pile on, but the general consensus is that it’s a very very bad song. Of course…she shouldn’t be too upset:

Viral web sensation Rebecca Black is the most popular kid on the internet – estimated to have earned $US40,000 in a week from her vanity YouTube music clip – but child psychologists and online reputation experts are sounding the alarm.

Frankly, I get the concern from child psychologists, but $40,000 is a lot of dough for a 13 year old. She can put towards a top notch college education and maybe a car and then every peer who sneers at her, she can respond to them using a Harvard education while driving her new model car. Not much to make fun of there.

People often forget, during their browsing of, and posting on, the Internet–that is a place where anonymity rules. While the Internet is a lawful place, there are certain parts of it which remain lawless. The comparison to early 20th century is America is apt–lawful is most areas, but with lawless frontiers too.

The Internet, as we all know, is a very public place where dirty washing doesn’t just get aired in front of people; it gets inspected, deconstructed, reposted and even spoofed if left unchecked. When the proverbial hits the online fan, the stench can stretch far and wide, and no matter how many windows you open, the smell may never go away.

This is as accurate of a statement about those corners of the Internet as I have seen. Remember, things that are posted on the Internet never truly go away because even if deleted, they get indexed. Search engine reputation management can do a lot to fix problems like this, but the four tips in the above article are well worth reading too.