Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently 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 was surprised to see I had more "sports" in my profile than anything else -must've been the Olympics. And it's nice that my "legal" was bigger than my "illegal"! But the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing. The one that stands out was "Your inquiry ‘Miss Cellania is an idiot' did not return any results." Ha! (Of course, now that I’ve written it out, there will be results for that query.) Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link -via the Presurfer
and this thing says it finds nothing of my full name or screen name!
I know when I google both I get results, wonder why its not working on this machine
To start off, it should have worked no matter what the screen size. Surely that's not difficult to achieve?
It struck me that you were just googling the information - Yahoo, whatever - and putting pretty colours to the words. I don't know how that shows "how the Internet sees you" any more than the actual words in context do. I thought MIT was more sophisticated than that.
I share my very common name (even first + last) with several famous people, so I am pretty anonymous.
Now that it turns out to be an "art project" instead of something, I don't know, interesting, I am a lot more sanguine about it.