When tracking your online rep goes bad

I'll admit, I am a little paranoid about shit talking behind my back.

In the last few months there have been more then a few moments where I have learned about real time shit talking. Sometimes I ignore shit talking because it doesn't help to confront it. Sometimes it starts a genuine dialog with someone who you barely know, ie my chat with Tina Nesberg at WNT camp this spring. When shit talking is directed at players I coach the gloves tend to come off. I expect to be denigrated behind my back, but leave the players I coach out of it.

Shit talking takes a lot of forms. Sometimes people think they're just talking about something, when actually they're talking shit. Other times people are pretty deliberate in their malice and ill will. In 2008 our shit talking is facilitated by so many electronic mediums: email, im, text messages, cell phones, facebook, myspace and of course, blogs. Everyone remembers my ill advised, heat of the moment post two falls ago about a certain game, which was a clinic on talking shit via blog.

I like to track my online persona to make sure that nothing unflattering is appearing via google to potential employers, SOs or just joe public. Normally this consists of me doing lots of googling. I troll around social networking sites to make sure any profiles are legit. In general I am just a creeper and make sure that there's nothing unflattering or more to the point; nothing too unflattering that I feel a need to intervene.

So i had one those moments this morning. I found something kind of of uncool in reference to me. But it wasn't in reference to me by name but I knew it meant me. You know when you have a moment in a game and you remember it and you wonder, "gee i wonder if the other girl remembered it?" Well in this case she did remember. In fact it turned out she said something to me on the field that I didn't hear. And I am glad I didn't hear it because I would have lost my mind. Or at the very least i would have been very miffed.

My online image is safe for another day, my ego, not so much .