Without the ability to drill down into the different categories, this is meaningless. For example, as a serial entrepreneur in the financial services industry, why is 15% of my online presence in "Art"?
I was also perplexed by this as several categories didn't seem to fit me at all. I was also shocked by a rather large section marked "illegal". Thanks to a link below from rrival, the philosophy behind the program is a mix of art and social awareness. We all expect computers to be infallible giving a precise characticture of ourselves from data. However, the computer is intrinsically unaware of many human traits and can't differentiate appropriately. Judging from my own reactions and those of others thus far, we haven't yet grasped this concept.
The philsophy: "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."
I share my name with several more famous than me. However there was a certain point around the turn of the century when it was just me. Sucks to be eclipsed.
sorry to say this, but typical media lab project - looks pretty, sounds groundbreaking, but is completely useless. I bet whoever made this got an A though.
i disagree. this is a great project. the project demonstrates the ability to quickly cull information from different spaces and combine that information via some algorithm for presentation.
what i see are two separate achievements here. collection and analysis. the collection looks good and they have implemented some algorithm. the efficacy of their algorithm may leave something to be desired in terms of accuracy, etc. nevertheless, the algorithm may be tuned/replaced/compared going forward.
i wont even go into the many many applications that something like this can have.
I enjoyed the difference between my real name (Jacob Aldridge) and my HN name (jacobaldridge) - the latter felt more accurate, though I support the various comments here about the arbitrary and unexplained sorting of the data.
Would imagine most HN users, whose name here is very different to their real name, would see a bigger discrepancy.
Seems to be made up. I have a unique name and really am not interested in the military or sports, but they still took up 1/3 of my characterization. And what the hell is "illegal" ??
I searched for my handle, the military stuff came from Everquest discussions on other message boards. In particular it seemed to be focusing on words like "tank" which describes a role in a "raid"; which are actually part of a fantasy video game not a real military discussion.
For my real name, I got a lot of sports stuff because there's a guy of the same name who writes sports books.
Anyway, I don't think it's all that accurate in categorization. They seem to pick up keywords and label them as some arbitrary category they've defined the word as. I showed up close to 15% in Fashion and I work in Infrastructure Engineering with a dab of Software.
If you have any kind of toolbar in your browser (e.g. are using Firefox with Stumbleupon or WebDeveloper toolbar) hide 'em to maximize browser-rendering real estate.
As with most searches, using my real name pulls up nothing to do with me, even though I use my real name in many places (in addition to 'randallsquared', which I started using back in 1999 precisely because 'randall randall' was effectively unsearchable).
"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."
The poor performance is part of it. That's pretty interesting. I wonder if they intentionally degraded it, and if a more sophisticated implementation would avoid some of the problems they hint at.
I believe that the window size thing reflects that its more of an experiment and possibly even an art piece, so they're managing the aesthetic experience.
My most common screen name produced reasonable results, but my real name is way too common to produce anything meaningful (unless I wanted to prove to someone that I am the most interesting man in the world).
i think part of the point of the project is that the online presence of our names is often misleading or totally unrelated to ourselves. If someone was searching for you, this is what they might find.
From the visualization, it looks like it runs search queries on the name given, then categorizes the words it finds into the colours/categories you see in the bar.
Having a last name that is commonly used as both a noun and a verb makes this sort of thing pretty useless. I can't really effectively Google myself either.
