The personas project is a brilliant project by the folk at MIT, to show you how the internet sees you.
It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity.
It basically trawls through your data and categorises what it finds into predetermined set of categories.
I’m pleased to see books rank so highly on my persona, although I’m not sure where the religion comes into it. Ditto for genealogy - I assume this is because it can’t differentiate between different people with the same name? It would be nice to see which data sources they used and then exclude incorrect ones.
It’s interesting to see that illegal appears higher than legal for my persona - I do wonder what they’re accessing there!
Well go ahead, check out your persona.
This post is tagged under: Analytics, Cool websites
Given that mine came out with a massive chunk labelled “sport”, I don’t think the site does anything more complex than combine all keywords around any instance of your name - for me, that means I’m combined with an american footballer, for one… :)
Okay, honestly, the ‘illegal’ bit kicks ass ;] I’d trade it for my ‘aggression’ or ‘professional’ stripes of my persona… (Where’s booze/drugs by the way? MIT’s being kinda politically correct I guess.)