First I had bad credit. It seems I wasn’t consuming in quite the right way.

Now I’ll have the opportunity to improve on that. Woots for me.

WTF is credit, anyway? I like to think of it like this:

Your neighbor sits on his porch and writes down every time he sees you do something. What a douchebag. He writes down when you pick up your newspaper, get the mail, mow the lawn, leave for work, get home from work, and anything else he might be able to see.

He’s not breaking any laws. He just sits on his porch and records information that you’ve chosen to share with the public. You know, by being alive and doing things and shit.

Additionally, he’s doing this for every house on the street within his field of view. He can’t see everywhere, though, so he hires people to do it on every street in your town.

He does this every day, 24/7, 365 days a year.

All of this data he has collected gets fed into a massive computer and creates something he calls your “file.” If you pay him a fee, he’ll allow you to look at it. If anyone else pays him a fee, he’ll allow them to look at it, too. He’s not discriminating as long as you bring the green stuff.

And that’s pretty much credit. A sleazy, greedy neighbor recording information that is, by necessity, considered to be “public” but is really none of their bloody business.

But that’s old skool. Old and busted, Experian! (One of the “Big 3” credit bureaus and the wonderful folks who bring you shitty mortgage ads on the internet and sneaky “free” credit report commercials on TV.)

What could be newer than credit?

Consider the world that eBay brought us. (Now a little old and busted themselves.) The feedback world.

If you were buying and selling on eBay, how in the world could you know who to trust? After all, these were strangers, not stores.

Those little feedbacks (positive and negative) became a reputation system that enabled people to determine if they could trust each other – or not.

Reputation and identity on the internet is about to become a very big deal. I’m guessing your online persona along with your avatar and publicly-identifiable information (harvested by the likes of Google, Facebook, and their ilk) will form your new “file,” a reputation “credit” score for the future.

Want to participate in the next big thing, like co-ops that share cars to produce organic crops used to produce gluten-free beer? You’ll need to bring your online reputation if you want to play well with others.

Imagine. Your every status update, blog post, and tweet will be recorded and live on. The record you create today will be online and last longer than it would take for Yucca Mountain to be a vacation spot. And the way you perform on every social media, barter, buy, sell, trade transaction will become a part of your permanent reputation file.

Remember the joke about trying to buy a pizza but the debit card knew your cholesterol score? That’s going to seem like small potatoes.

Gee, I wonder. Should I give a flying shit about my online reputation or not?

Anyone have examples of this reputation thing coming down the pike? Share it in the comment section below…