Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently 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!
I just took my so-called “Personas” test (click here to take yours). I’d have to say it’s pretty accurate considering I write about a lot of different topics. The only category that threw me was the “sports” category. I guess I’ve mentioned the New York Mets on more than one occasion (sorry) and I have promoted a couple of Aussie Rules football match meetups here in San Francisco. Heck, I even met an AFL’er once – and yes, I made a blog post about him….
Other categories that came up for me were: online, books, education, news, social, religious, art and medical (for many years I edited and wrote about medical and veterinary topics – an old piece of mine on a laser procedure for declawing cats is still out there).
Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.
To find out how you look online, you just have to enter your name. An “algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data” scours the web for information and attempts to characterize you to fit into a predetermined set of categories.
What you’ll get is a groovy little color chart, like the one shown at the top of this post, that cites the categories you’re most associated with online.
Kathy Drasky regularly writes about online culture. Her marketing and communications work with the ANZA Technology Network, Advance Global Australians and with various Australians and Australian enterprises has led to at least a dozen trips Down Under.
An accomplished digital photographer, her photos have appeared in 7×7 Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and Google Schmap.
