ReadWriteWeb

Online reputation has been measured by in-bound links through Google Ranking, RSS and feed subscribers and now, the number of social media shares on services like Klout and Echo apps. As new reputation systems have emerged, an army of deceptive users have risen up to game them via link farms and exchanges, fake profile generators and most recently, Twitterbots.

It's no question that social media reputation has become the influencer metric du jour, but we've yet to see an all encompassing platform that isn't gameable. Social stock market site Empire Avenue is certainly no exception.

Yesterday, I wrote about the things you can do to prepare your startup's website pre-launch. But your online presence doesn't solely exist on and shouldn't solely rely on your company website. And it's incredibly valuable that just as you work on it, that you work to develop an online presence for you, the entrepreneur.

Case in point: the relaunch this past week of SpeakerText, whose CEO Matt Mireles I had a chance to talk to. Looking back at the first mention of SpeakerText on ReadWriteWeb in January, that story begins, "You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles." But now, despite a back-to-the-drawing-board period for SpeakerText where the company itself was pretty quiet, if you're active in entrepreneurial circles online, you're much more likely to have heard of Mireles. He blogs and comments. He's active on Twitter and on Hacker News.

The same day on which Facebook has rolled back changes to its default privacy settings, Pew Research has released a report on privacy and reputation among young adults that has some interesting results. Though many have proposed that older generations of Internet users are more concerned with privacy online, Pew's study found that young adults aged 18 to 29 are more likely to monitor their online reputations by changing settings and deleting items on social networks.

Although securing and promoting your company's brand is an important step when starting a business, and although protecting that brand can be an ongoing concern, the question of what it means to associate a person with a company brand is a lot more complicated - a fact made obvious in light of Tiger Wood's sex scandals. The companies that featured Woods in their advertising had sought to latch onto Tiger-Woods-as-a-brand - an image crafted to suggest his tenacity, reliability, skill, and success.

Unvarnished is a new website where you can post and read anonymous reviews of people and their professional performance. That sounds a little frightening, doesn't it?

TechCrunch has been writing about it for days and the company just started rolling out invites. See Michael Arrington's thought provoking, if extreme, post Reputation Is Dead: It's Time To Overlook Our Indiscretions and Evelyn Rusli's review Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation. I told Unvarnished founder Pete Kazanjy that I thought he was doing more harm than good, I heard his response and now I've tried his site. It turns out that reality is a lot more complex than the hype. Unvarnished is both more intellectually interesting and less freakishly prurient than you might think.

We hear a lot about how starting a company takes some serious entrepreneurial DNA with traits like ambition, drive, relentlessness, and above all, passion. But some might argue that these are just the good sounding attributes that can lead to success; what about the other characteristics that may not sound so great? According to WePay co-founder Rich Aberman, starting a company also requires some arrogance and naïveté, so here's his advice on founding a startup straight from the entrepreneurial front-lines.

In many cases it's worse to have your investor back out on a term sheet then it is to never be offered one. Before popping the champagne bottles and celebrating what looks like an offer, it's best to remember that VC term sheets are not legally binding. While it's certainly a feat to be offered one, angel investor and Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon wrote a great piece reminding startup entrepreneurs what can happen if your potential investor changes his or her mind.

Not sure how trustworthy those Wikipedia articles really are? A few months from now, the addition of WikiTrust as a standard feature for the English Wikipedia will give users one more tool to evaluate the trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles and editors. WikiTrust, an extension for MediaWiki, the software as the core of Wikipedia, assigns a color code to each word in an article, depending on the author's reputation and how often the text has been edited recently.

If you're into electronica, you've likely grabbed some sets from your favorite DJs. And while DJ sets are a great way to get fresh content from some of your favorite artists, they all suffer from one annoying drawback: a set is usually a single file devoid of any track information. What's more, it's usually a huge file spanning one or more hours. As such, listening to these cutting-edge digital sets becomes, ironically, a very traditional linear experience akin to listening to the radio. You don't know what you're listening to or what's coming next.

Mugasha, a new service focused on the world of electronic music, hopes to improve that listening experience by taking those long sets and parsing them into something you can use.