Aug 19, 2009  •  In Marketing/Advertising, Personal, Web

Your Online Persona, Visualized

Those crazy folks at the MIT Media Lab have created a web application called Personas which maps out your online persona in the form of a stacked bar chart.

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.

I’ve decided to try my name and “Geek in Heels.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t do “geekinheels” since it asks for a first and last name. Let’s see how the internet sees me… (click to enlarge)

Some of the keywords such as “education” and “medical” in my full name persona are surprising. But then again, my name is not truly unique.

The keyword that stunned me in my “Geek in Heels” profile was “aggression.” Do I seem that angry? Perhaps it’s all the exclamation points and the numerous things I find to b*tch about via the web? And how do I have such a large “military” presence on the web?

What is your online persona?

Via Miss Cellania.

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One Response to “Your Online Persona, Visualized”

  1. Jessica says:

    This is neat, but unfortunately my name is much too popular to have any real results. 🙁 Case in point, when I enter my name, my chart is about 40% sports. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned sports online in my life, haha.

    If I could use my screen name, however, I think it would be much more accurate.

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