If there is one thing the Internet is known for, it is besmirching otherwise spotless reputations. This is because the Internet is ruled by nothing other than our consciences–and within the deep, dark, corners of the Internet where anonymity reigns, it is both popular and useful to malign other people, companies, and organizations. This Business Insider article makes a good point about your good reputation being one of the few things that people can take from you without legal recourse, assuming they do it online, so it makes sense that having an online identity is not just a question of popularity and image now, it is one of security.

We all know that our “presence” online continues to grow and at the same time, your reputation online is becoming ever more important. Just think about how much effort people are putting right now into blogging (myself included), answering questions on Quora, tweeting on Twitter, checking in on Foursquare, reviewing places on Yelp and Qype as well as communicating on Facebook.

The author of the Business Insider article is quite correct–online identities are already important. The good news, and bad, is that online identities are going to become even more important in the coming years. That is a prediction you can take to the bank–certainly no one can say how much more important, but Internet reputations will undoubtedly become more important in coming weeks, months, and years. As a consequence, search engine reputation management is only going to increase in importance too.

More and more information is being put online every single day. This includes more and more private information about people, including you. There are now directories full of personal information about you and most of the people you know, sort of like an Internet phonebook, but with even more information involved. Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook–using social networks like these has become the norm, rather than the exception. But the information you publish there is not within a contained system, other organizations and websites can either gather or purchase information about your profiles on those social networking sites.

Paul Jozefak, in this article, does a good job of breaking down why this is important and why so many people, who have nothing to hide, care so much about this issue. It is good to see that some people, Jozefak amongst them, understand why this is an issue, even to people who do not have anything whatsoever to hide from the public at large. It is an issue of privacy and not wanting to be unfairly defamed in an atmosphere, the Internet, that offers no legal protections.