personas
While exploring Posterous earlier, I discovered Personas, an interesting site that deciphers how the internet sees you. The site's philosophy:
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.
So, I punched in my name and, once the information had been compiled, this is what I got:
Having Googled myself in the past, I know that my name usually comes up in relation to my academic pursuits. So, the references to management, professional, and education were not surprising. I'm still scratching my head as to how online, sports, art, and fashion were extracted - I suppose that these are examples of the inadvertent errors, although, given that my name is essentially a unique identifier, I highly doubt that the errors are the result of confusion with other people with the same name.
Then I did the same exercise with my handle (or whatever ariannerh is called - I seem to remember Kevin referring to it as a handle). I haven't included my surname on my Twitter or Posterous accounts, so the data used to formulate the results using ariannerh shouldn't overlap with those used when I entered my name. And, the results were remarkably different:
As one might expect, the online persona that I have consciously created through tweets and blogging seems to be much more representative of who I perceive myself to be, although the emphasis on fame is puzzling. Good to know that the persona that I've cultivated is slightly less illegal and much more social than the persona that has been subconsciously created based on my "real life" pursuits.
