One I found a few months ago because the owner began commenting on posts here at MemberCon.com. Tom from BuildThatList.com would chime in occasionally on posts – some comments were OK, but others just felt like they were posted just to be the first commenter.

But every comment doesn’t need to be brilliant prose, so I let them be. I did occasionally flip the comments from oldest on top to newest on top, just to see if anyone had a reaction (anyone notice?).

Tom’s blog focused on internet marketing and building an email list. It seemed to have a growing following and his posts were interesting and helpful. The discussions in the comments was growing as well. Posts were beginning to receive between 20 and 45 comments each.

Then something….weird happened.

In the past three weeks, the writing in the posts began to deteriorate. The titles of the posts were generic and there weren’t any links in the posts. I continued to read but each time thought to myself, “Wow that post wasn’t really helpful at all. In fact, I have no idea what he just said…”

Then today’s post title finally got me to go over to the site and find out exactly what type of mind-altering drugs Tom was taking. The post title was, “How Do You Think the Build Your List?”

But, alas, no Tom.

The author of the posts is now “Bob”. Comments are few and far between. Most posts have zero comments.

The site must have been either sold or Tom decided that it was easier to outsource the blog posts to freelancers writing for a couple bucks an article. The posts now all sound more like lame Ezine articles than blog thoughts.

Maybe that’s the new model – build traffic using legitimate blog posts and then try to keep the momentum going with cheap outsource articles in order to plaster the site with affiliate ads. Does that really work? I can’t imagine it does.

With the momentum I saw there, Tom could have easily continued on and sold his own information product on how to build and monetize an email list for any site. That would have been a natural.

Tom are you there? What the heck happened? Did you sell and make a pretty penny? Did you tire of blogging?

It’s Tom’s site – he can do whatever he wants with it, of course. I’m just curious as heck to find out why he decided to go this route. It had such promise.

(I didn’t link to the site because I don’t want to give it any juice not that it seems to be heading the direction of a spam blog, but type in the URL to check it out).

Update: Turns out Tom did sell the site. Tom I’d love to find out more about your decision.

As you can imagine, there were a host of problems right from the start that made the site difficult to execute. The obvious issue of trying to ensure the comments you were viewing were for the right “John Smith” you had a date with that evening was just one of the many, many issues we tried to tackle. Privacy issues were another.

But there were also a number of interesting things we came across that we didn’t expect. When we floated the idea to several people in the digital identity industry as well as several people who study online ethics, one person’s comments struck us as odd. She stated that such a site should include the ability to control every piece of information about the person being commented on. In fact, she truly believed that everyone should have full control of their own reputation online. This made no sense to me. In the offline world, a person does not have control over their reputation. Sure, you can act in a way that improves your reputation, but ultimately your reputation is controlled by everyone who knows you. It’s something that can be tweaked and adjusted based on your own behavior, but full control? I don’t think so.

So why should the online world be any different? Just as a poor reputation can cause you to lose out on a job opportunity (or a date) in the offline world, the online world can have the same affect. With one exception – there is no central database of “reputation” that people in the offline world can go to. Prior to the world wide web, you had to connect to someone who knew a person to get their opinion – and then it was just one person’s opinion. Today, Google, Yahoo!, MSN and more offer a central database of information on people. And it is a database that doesn’t forget, forgive or die. That old friendship that soured five years ago could be forgotten as lives moved in different directions. But the nasty comment you left on your blog and later regretted – Google never forgets that thanks to the magic of caching – even if you delete it.

It would be interesting to have two types of search results that I could view when I was searching a person – what they wanted me to see, and what the search engine thought was the best overall representation of that person. When I search for John Doe, another button perhaps would be added to Google’s home page under the search box: Google Search, I’m Feeling Lucky, and….”John Doe’s Results”, where I see the results that John wants the world to see when they search on him.

In the end, the online world operates a lot like the offline world when it comes to reputation. Just like an offline jerk can begin to improve his reputation by being kinder to his fellow human beings, you can massage your online reputation by adding connections and content that pushes the past further into the past (and in this case, further down in the search engine results).

You do have control over your online reputation – to a point. An article by Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin is a good example of how a person can do just that.

By the way, we never launched the dating reputation site. In the end, we felt that unless we required everyone who left a comment on their date to use their verified real identity, it wouldn’t be of much use. Unless, of course, the goal was to ruin your date’s reputation.

People just weren’t ready to use their full identity online back then – they still aren’t actually. But as a content creator and website business owner, you don’t have a choice. I see so many content sites trying to sell something without a shred of information about who is behind it. I guarantee they don’t sell a thing. Nobody wants to buy from someone who doesn’t trust their customers enough to let them know who they are.

If you want to start a successful membership or subscription or content sales site of any kind, get used to the fact that people will know your name.