Thursday, August 20, 2009

How does the internet see you?

Personas is a product of the Sociable Media Group from MIT. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. It shows you how the Internet sees you. 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 downside is that
if there are many people with an online presence sharing your name, the result isn't really just you. But it is interesting. For some reason, Personas doesn't see me.

The picture is a shot taken while Personas was analyzing Calgary's mayor.

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