I don't often point people to online game-like interactive thingies, but this one has my endorsement. Give yourself a few minutes to watch the process. It can be gruesome:
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). 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.
If it is not gruesome enough for you, enter my name, you'll be shocked.
Hint: If using a small screen, a) run this in its own firefox window, and b) use F11 to maximize the screen if requested by the application. Then, when it's done, you'll have to close the window with brute force because F11 probably won't work from within the flash display that will have filled the screen. So Alt-F4 or Alt-Tab your way out of there.
Good luck.
Hat Tip: Joe
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Huh! My real name and my blog name seem to belong to two different people.
Apparently I don't exist.
I think I like that. Or would if I existed.
It declared my screen too small. I have one much larger than the 7" they said was likely the problem, so I don't know why it wouldn't work.
Hmm... I don't get it. The output is just coloured bars of various lengths, labeled with such categories as 'family', 'sports', 'politics' etc. I can't find any explanation, but presumably these represent my/your online image or impact (?) in each area.
The output appears to be derived by analyzing a small (~30) set of statements about me/you by others, not by analyzing our own statements. The flickering highlighting suggests that each statement is analyzed multiple times, but there's no indication of what is being done.
Not very gruesome to my eyes, but maybe I'm missing something.
What a weird little exercise in data mangling.
If one inputs "Joseph Ratzinger" into the website, the strongest correlation is for sports. The website seems to consider all occurences of "Cardinal" as sports-related.
Which just goes to show that data mining without applied real-world knowledge can be quite stupid.
Yeah, I Godwined it by entering Hitler. I don't think the output is very interesting at the end, but the little paragraphs along the bottom are interesting. Especially if you are not smeared over the internet but your name is shared with two or three famous people (as is the case with my wife).
At least "Digital Cuttlefish" referred to me; my meatspace name, apparently, belongs solely to somebody else.
Damn, as my real name I'm a band! With several albums out. And here I thought I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
Seriously, none of the mentions were of the real me, just name collisions.
This is stupid. Apparently I don't exist, and when I ran my boyfriend's name several times for the hell of it, it came up with different results each time. I mean, I'm not the most technologically savvy person in the world, but it doesn't seem like just a name would be enough to do anything even close to what it's claiming to do. How exactly would it know which "john doe" you're inquiring about if there are 2 million john does? And how would it be able to separate out different individuals' information correctly?
I wish I *could* run it, because every time I've googled myself, I just get me. Apparently, I am unique. Both my meatspace and nom du net -- (please don't use my nom du net somewhere just to spoil it. :) ) I'd like to either disprove or have another data point in favor of the uniqueness.
Yay! I've apparently done a good job of keeping my personal name off the intertubes these last fifteen years. Although according to Personas I'm a professional magician, incredible public speaker, and manager of risk management at a major software company. I guess my meatspace name isn't as rare as I thought.
The last two statements it analyzed for me were a report of me having a stroke and then my obituary. Rather premature, I must say...
LOL ... awkwardly.
Weird, I typed in my name and two actual facts about me came up.