

Visual Map of Your Name's Online Presence - kingkawn
http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb

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Flemlord
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"?

~~~
dan_the_welder
Because it's not 'you' it's every person who shares your name.

~~~
KiwiNige
And I happen to share my name with some one far more famous than me....

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dan_the_welder
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.

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marstall
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.

~~~
siculars
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.

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bcl
Pretty animation. Actual information = 0. Especially when using my first+last
name since there are quite a few of us with the same name.

Without being able to see what was used to generate each category it is
nothing more than eye candy.

~~~
JacobAldridge
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.

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lucraft
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" ??

~~~
Goladus
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.

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zngtk4
I repeated this three times with my name. It gave me _completely_ different
results each time...

~~~
eznet
4 times here - completely different each time... Only thing consistent was it
said that I went to the University of Tennessee, which I did not...

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Titanous
Try using "Paul Graham". The visualization is quite interesting.

~~~
embeddedradical
Paul Graham is a little bit late to really shock us all with this headline on
such an obvious topic. - a result from the visual map of "Paul Graham"

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alex_c
All I see is "increase your window size please".

~~~
indiejade
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.

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fretje
It will be me, but... I. Don't. Get. It.

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randallsquared
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).

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diiq
Neat. I like it. It surprized me that the result for the same name was
different on succesive attempts.

But why in god's name did I have to increase my window size?

~~~
kingkawn
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.

~~~
kingkawn
also, the only way i got it to work was by fullscreening the browser.

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rrival
This is helpful: <http://personas.media.mit.edu/> Would be great to see a
profile comparison feature.

~~~
shaddi
Very interesting...

"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.

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edward
On my netbook it just says "increase your window size please". The screen
resolution on the MSI Wind is 1024x600.

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rationalbeaver
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).

~~~
kingkawn
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.

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kevindication
Bleh: "Express Install is not supported on this operating system."

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Titanous
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.

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cruise02
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.

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blhack
Put your online identity in for a much more interesting visualization. I used
"blhack", and it was much more accurate and interesting to watch.

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mrlebowski
Come on, its not even a Friday today, its just a tool that looks pretty and
makes no sense.

Oh yeah, very suitable for HN.

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tokenadult
I get a stupid "increase your window size please" message when I visit the
link. Not ready for prime time.

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elai
Takes the top 3 google results and associates semi-arbritary categorys to
certain words.

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ackack
I find it interesting that no matter who i search for i get 'no digital traces
found'.

~~~
JacobAldridge
The ultimate insult in an online world?

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zipstudio
completely wrong in my case.

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okeumeni
I dont see a thing!

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trezor
Doesn't accept "ø" which is actually a real world letter that happens to be
found in my name. Useless.

A plea to developers: If you are going to do filtering and sanitizing on your
input, at least make sure you get it right.

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TweedHeads
Call me back when it computes the results in less than a couple of seconds.

