A LOOK AT REPUTATION ON THE WEB: “Nobody knows you’re a dog on the Web–or a mechanic, athlete, hacker, marketing whiz, zealot, or SQL programmer. That is, unless you tell them. In which case, they may or may not believe you, and they have few options for verifying your credentials anyway. . . . Make no mistake, though; online identities matter, and they’ll matter even more as the number of blogs, wikis, and social networks grows, making it increasingly difficult to sort out the Web’s wheat from the chaff of misinformation, factual errors, and malware. What we need–bloggers, businesspeople, technology professionals–are better ways to let others know who we are, verifying what we tell them and showing that we’ve got the cred to back it up.” People are working on it.