I have a blog (Filmmaker blog), a lot of articles published online, and a bunch of film producing credits, so if you Google my name you'll call up a lot of hits. But if you scroll down those pages, you'll discover a bit of bad behavior now recorded for all of time (or, at least until the World Wide Web is destroyed by some strain of techno-Ebola): apparently, while receiving a complimentary ride from the airport to a film festival, I talked on my cell phone the whole time. The volunteer driver, who obviously took the gig because he wanted to meet people from the film business, thought I was something of a jerk. And, he notated such on his own blog.

Forget whatever problem I had to deal with at that moment -- I'm in the target audience for Reputation Defender, a new start-up that promises, for fees ranging from $10 to $16 a month, to scour the internet hunting for negative mentions of a client and then, for an additional $30 per instance, to remove the offending comment.

Wired has reported on the company, quoting founder Michael Fertik as saying, "We all make honest mistakes, and there's no reason the internet should make those mistakes eternally hurtful to ourselves and others." The Wired article cites the company's client base as ranging from parents who want to get rid of their kids bad behavior as documented on Facebook or MySpace to job-seekers aware that companies routinely troll the internet for info about a prospective employee.

And while one can think of many potential clients for Reputation Defender -- Tara Reid might seek to have all of her up-skirts taken off of Fleshbot, for example -- we all might be in the company's target demographic -- whether we've participated in rude cell phone gabbing or not. As Wired notes, one of the business's services, "My Privacy," attempts to fight identity theft by removing personal data such as Social Security numbers, drivers' license numbers and home addresses from data-brokering websites