Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.
I was surprised to see I had more "sports" in my profile than anything else -must've been the Olympics. And it's nice that my "legal" was bigger than my "illegal"! But the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing. The one that stands out was "Your inquiry ‘Miss Cellania is an idiot' did not return any results." Ha! (Of course, now that I’ve written it out, there will be results for that query.) Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link -via the Presurfer
And what came up while it was processing was "absolutely beautiful"
and I got all happy and warm and fuzzy inside...
but then I realized....
That was a comment i had written on amazon.com about one of the earrings i purchased..
*cries*
My main alias that I use here gives 29 scrolls all related to that rockband.
My real name gives 2 scrolls with information about fascinating people with Glorious careers that are definitely not mine...
So I'm safe. :-)
I am befuddled over how big the 'sports' block is -- regardless of what name is entered.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/7597
It seems like it's pulling key words out of a search, in which case I'm surprised it's not showing more results for "the" and "I."
You guys should read the text on personas.media.mit.edu, where you'll see this is an art piece that is critiquing data mining. Inaccuracies are a part of it, although not intentionally put in. The first couple comments are clearly people who got the point of it, which is great to see since this is being shown on the Internet without the added context of the entire museum exhibit.
As far as the "repeatability", the data is what Yahoo gives me. No trickery here.
Aaron
Now that it turns out to be an "art project" instead of something, I don't know, interesting, I am a lot more sanguine about it.
I share my very common name (even first + last) with several famous people, so I am pretty anonymous.
To start off, it should have worked no matter what the screen size. Surely that's not difficult to achieve?
It struck me that you were just googling the information - Yahoo, whatever - and putting pretty colours to the words. I don't know how that shows "how the Internet sees you" any more than the actual words in context do. I thought MIT was more sophisticated than that.
and this thing says it finds nothing of my full name or screen name!
I know when I google both I get results, wonder why its not working on this machine