There's no point in trying to manage your reputation on the internet any more. It's too late. Skeletons are out of their cupboards and rampaging about online, and anyone can say whatever they like about a company or a person without fear of redress.

Soon it'll get even worse: a website for sniping about people is to be launched that will be like Yelp - which allows consumers anonymously to slag off companies - so that there will be one place for us all to go to read all the nasty (and less nasty) things that everyone has to say about everyone else.

Does this matter? Not really, argued the editor of the blog Tech Crunch last week . He said our online reputations might be uncontrollable beasts, but they are toothless ones: they can't really hurt us.