Similar to Google Profiles, Zooity and MyBlogLog, Retaggr condenses all your online information into one handy place. Yet once you start messing around with Retaggr, you see it’s a lot more than a simple online contact hub.

As well as giving you the option to save all your profiles in one place, Retaggr acts as the ultimate social business card. Your contact details, work address, website, blog, street map and more are instantly available.

It also shows what blogs you’re reading, what you’re discussing around the web, multimedia uploads, your latest blog feed and online resume service just to name a few. You can then use that information on a handy business card that you can place on your blog or website. Check the Retaggr card under my short bio to the right, or the main card on my About page to see how it looks.

While Google Profiles shares similar ideas, the interactivity of Retaggr makes it a completely different beast.

You can email someone directly from their business card; join in an IM chat; listen to their music library on the likes of Blip.fm and much, much more.

As you can probably tell, I’m impressed. Even though Retaggr has been out a little while now, they continue to add to and improve their features. If you’re serious about your online presence, I can’t recommend Retaggr enough – it really is that cool.

Check out Retaggr for yourself or have a look at my extended profile and let me know what you think – useful? Will you use it or give it a miss?

Tagging Your Online Identity with Retaggr originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.

Yet this isn’t always a good thing, as a friend of mine recently found out.

Typing her name into Google, she found herself on the Rip Off Report website, under a list of false accusations about her. What makes it worse with the Rip Off Report website is that the owner protects the names of the accusers yet will quite happily publish any story or complaint without checking the facts.

Instead, the accused can issue a rebuttal but that’s it – the complaint (false or otherwise) stays on the site for the whole world to see.

This seems morally and ethically wrong to me. Unfortunately, it also seems fairly common when it comes to your online reputation. If anyone can go online and post lies about you or your business, the results can obviously be extremely damaging. While you can certainly take out a lengthy and potentially costly lawsuit, the damage has been done.

This is why it’s so important to keep tabs on what’s being said about you online. Although you may not be able to prevent something from being written, you can react to it a lot quicker. Some of the best methods of monitoring your online presence include:

• Google Alerts. Still in Beta, Google Alerts allow you to type in a certain keyword or phrase and whenever that’s referred to online, you’ll be alerted.

• Social Mention. Excellent tool that searches the web for any mention of you, your business or brand. Can take its time to find all the results but the information it retrieves makes the wait worthwhile.

• Technorati. The “blog bible”, this site allows you to type in keywords, URL’s or tags and any posts that make a mention of these words will show up.

These are just some of the free methods you can use to keep track of what’s being said about you online. There are various professional business services available as well, if you need a more corporate-led approach.

Whichever one you choose to use, make sure you use it regularly. Otherwise you may find yourself in the same situation as my friend currently does – and a reputation can be a hard thing to rebuild once tarnished.

Do You Know What’s Being Said About You Online? originally appeared on Danny Brown - under a Creative Commons license.