Who are you? More importantly what does the Internet think you are? Personas, from Aaron Zinman, thinks it knows – and you might be quite surprised at the outcome.

Image Credit: Personas

I stumbled upon this interesting web based application from an article on the Guardian Technology Blog, see How does the internet see you?

On the surface, it is a bit fun and quite quirky in that it applies data mining techniques to look for references (“characterizing statements”) for a given name (first name and last name combination) then cross references key words (based around the English language), and applies other clever algorithms, to produce something akin to a DNA profile, called a “Personas Vector”.

To be honest it doesn’t say a lot about me as an individual – but that’s not the point of the application (actually it is exactly the point if you read the background section of the site). There are many people out there with my name and whilst it seemed largely interested in them over me it is pretty neutral in its findings and demonstrates a cold hard fact that information, no matter how cleverly collected, requires a lot more than statistical techniques to derive any real value out of it.

You can also treat the application as a bit of fun, it is also sometimes quite insightful, to see an array of statements attached to your name. However, don’t expect to make use of the output as exporting the image is not allowed – as the site says “any generated design is fairly copyrighted”.

Visit Personas.