Here's a worrying trend - people are pretending to be other people on the Internet and social networks.

So far, so incredibly well-known, predictable and not at all surprising.

What is perhaps more of a surprise is that when a fake is uncovered they tend to stick around. They don't go away, no matter how much we might want them to.

This has implications for Web marketeers - specifically that imitators are less easy to get rid of than you might have thought. This is bad news because it means the only way to be certain is through prevention. So basically if you're responsible for a company's brand, you need the .co.uk and .com domains - then the .info, .mobi, .tv...

This is fine for the larger corporations who have the resources. But I can see smaller businesses who can't afford a full-time identity manager suffering as a result of this.