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Personas: Visualization of how the internet sees you.

I ran across this site while reading Swiss Miss and am pretty impressed at the visuals while it loads, Here are screen captures that show the process and end result.

"What is Personas?
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.

How does it work?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile."

Created by: Aaron Zinman.
Source: http://personas.media.mit.edu

     
Try it for yourself.

 

 

Comments (20)

Aug 19, 2009
Liza Sperling said...
Visualization of how the internet sees me? I am scared to look, but well done! Links to the source for the brave folks ready to try it.
Aug 19, 2009
Nicholas Patten said...
:) It gathers up any information pertaining to your first and last name and then displays the text/colors on a timeline. Aaron Zinman did a great job of creating it.
Aug 20, 2009
Michael Litman said...
I didnt get any further than it asking me to increase my window size? Wtf? I'm on a fairly large screen :(
Aug 20, 2009
Tony Long said...
This is great work...but I can't help chuckling that perhaps it's like comparing ones results between Google and Bing. On the former I'm 3 guys that aren't me, but on Bing I'm rather prominently me.

Like Max, I'm 100% online...or so I thought... ;-)

Aug 20, 2009
Jeremy Gould said...
I had a play - it looks nice but it wasn't very accurate. Like Max and Tony, it picked up info about other people with my name. And what to do with the output, it was pretty meaningless, but pretty.
Aug 20, 2009
Patsi Krakoff said...
I didnt get any further than it asking me to increase my window size? I'm on a fairly large screen :(
Aug 20, 2009
Nicholas Patten said...
Hey thanks for comments, It can't tell the difference from who is who with the same exact name. I just thought it was a nice visual. :)
Aug 20, 2009
Jeremy Gould said...
Don't think its an issue of screen size, more of ratio of the window? I'm on a macbook and just pulled the bottom of the window down a bit and it seemed to work fine. On Macs, the Dock tends to stop Safari or Firefox from using the full screen unless you manually adjust it.
Aug 20, 2009
Thanks for this post. Very cool - although as the authors note, it shows what the "internet" knows about you -- so typos, sharing of names, etc. all gets factored in. Gave me so much to think about.
Aug 20, 2009
Lee Winik said...
Really cool post. Tried it twice with my name and it was interesting to see that I received two completely different results. BTW love the free twitter backgrounds. Keep up the great work!
Aug 24, 2009
Tamara Thorne said...
Amazing. I'm going to run this thing whenever I need a pep talk.
Aug 26, 2009
Looks so MIT Media Lab... there's definitely an affinity for long color bars with primary colors -- that's their brand.

See for yourself... http://media.mit.edu

Sep 02, 2009
Louise Højrup said...
Awesome!
Sep 03, 2009
Lorne Pike said...
Even in the middle of a busy day and between meetings and reports, something like this can make you just sit there and play like a kid again. Very cool. Will be sharing this!
Sep 06, 2009
mediacollective said...
interesting to say the least, would be fun to hang out at that lab at MIT
Sep 08, 2009
Janey said...
Hi, I got totally sucked in to this for the last hour or so.. ;> This, a very interesting concept, and so is your blog, Nicholas. I'm so glad you stopped in at mine, otherwise I might not have found you and that would definitely be my loss. I have a famous name (not the fame, just the name..:) so when I entered it at Personas, I was surprised how many pages it returned. I got a good laugh! I'll be returning here. Thanks for enlarging my world tonight.
Sep 09, 2009
Nicholas Patten said...
Hi Janey, thanks for the kind words. Ya, that site is really cool. Hopefully they can go even more in depth with it.
Sep 10, 2009
Raj Panjwani said...
Nice find Nicholas. So an engaging. The one thing that really impressed me was the absence of a Submit button.
Oct 21, 2009
Carl Hamlin said...
Interestingly enough, it's been coming up with very strange results not only for me, but for other folks I've shown it to, as well. Would be interesting to see how it did with a few more parameters to narrow the scope.
Oct 21, 2009
Nicholas Patten said...
Ya, I think it's probably difficult because of all of the name confusions. I'm sure using the name "John Smith" in the search makes it impossible to identify. But still pretty cool.

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