Personas

How does the internet see YOU?

From the website:

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.

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.

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

This is my persona created with my name. Click for larger view.



The problem with "my" persona is that there was nothing about ME (that I could see) but instead it used mentions of other people with my name: an author, a police chief, etc.

Personas

furbelow

furbelow \FUR-buh-low\ , noun:
1. A pleated or gathered flounce on a woman's garment; a ruffle.
2. Something showy or superfluous; a bit of showy ornamentation.

---

My cat has fur all over, don't you know.
He's got fur on top, and furbelow.

That's much nicer than the poem I was thinking of posting.

The Toddler Party

I've found a new political party that intrigues me.

This little girl makes more sense than most politicians.

How Long?

Another strange Google search auto-complete.

Look! My Book Nook!

You Are Fantasy / Sci Fi

You have an amazing imagination, and in your mind, all things are possible. You are open minded, and you find the future exciting. You crave novelty and progress. Compared to most people, you are quirky and even a bit eccentric. You have some wacky ideas. And while you may be a bit off the wall, there's no denying how insightful and creative you are.

What Kind of Book Are You?

Monkey On Your Back

From the site:

Waiting on someone to do something for you?

Send one of our specially trained monkeys to remind them!

Monkey On Your Back is your to-do list for things that you want other people to do.

Create a monkey for each task you want to delegate to someone else. We'll send that person email reminders about the task, and email you a reminder when the deadline for the task has expired.

Monkey On Your Back