How The Internet Sees You

Ken AshfordRandom Musings1 Comment

I don't quite understand this:

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.

Ummmmm… rrrrright.

So I tried it, entering my name.

The problem is that when the Internet "sees" Ken Ashford, it sees me and two other dudes with the same name.  So my "profile" (shown below) is really a congomeration of the Internet identity of three different people named Ken Ashford.

Internetme  

Anyway, try it out yourself.