Job hunting after college is exciting. Your first real job. But then, on the eve of finding out if you scored that plush job at that Forturn 500 company, you get an email from your head hunter saying you have been dropped from contention. Then they send you a list of Myspace and Facebook web links with photos of you 1/2 naked, drinking beer or smoking illegal substances.

Well yes, you were not so smart to fall into to voyeurism trap facilitated by social networking, but what to do next? Hint, the technical term is adjudication.

Pete @ Mashable does a nice job explaining Reputation Defender:

So what does it do? Well, ReputationDefender tracks mentions of you across various sites. They monitor a range of social networks including MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo and LiveJournal, plus blogs, news sites, media sharing sites like Flickr, Webshots, Photobucket and YouTube and many more sites across the web. They then send you a monthly update showing what they’ve found - if you’re a prolific blogger, that update could be fairly lengthy.

Opinity, Trufina (past and present clients) Rapleaf, iKarma and other companies are trying to come up with various business models to support the need for better online identity tools and services. ReputationDefender comes out of nowhere, off in their own niche, essentially betting that whatever services are launched to protect your identity, somewhere, someone will always screw something up.

Aggregation, protection and adding value to nets of personal data online is going to be a huge business. Several companies are looking for the secret sauce of service differentiation and finding a niche that works for their business models. If they execute well, Reputation Defender could own a significant chunk of the emerging reputation management market.

I wonder if they will have a dating-specific offering, for Truedater and the other rate-a-date sites.

I agree with Pete that I too would pay to stop people from republishing my blog content and wrapping it with Google ads. When you start to think about it, there are lots of services that ReputationDefender could launch.

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