Comments on: Personas Web

By: Sinjin

Sinjin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:21:17 +0000

I found it through someone on Twitter… and I think it’s mostly baloney. It couldn’t find any info about me, and when I tried a friend, it found text that has nothing to do with her. It also seems to analyze the same 3 words over and over, in different contexts… just doesn’t make sense.

And yes, at the end the bars look pretty but need the choice to Cmd-click on them. At least give us the percentage size of the bar slice, maybe the number of ‘hits’ relevant to it (if it’s not all BS, see above)

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:28:45 +0000

@ethan it would be nice to know if there is some sort of purposeful algorithm in there that perhaps decides what data to gather, or what starting points to follow. I can only guess what it is doing — is it walking a tree of results brought back from the Google search API? Or…what?

@slava this idea of a non-digital imprint, some sort of object that is representative in a unique way to the results of your digital footprint — that’s quite intriguing. A kind of fab’d key or something. Hmmm…

By: Julian Bleecker

Julian Bleecker — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:18:00 +0000

Hey Billy!

By: Slava Kozlov

Slava Kozlov — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:07:56 +0000

Nice tool, I imagine having it somewhere near would be useful, so you could see how your activity impact your footprint, your digital ‘karma’, if you will. Or may be even not only digital.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:50:48 +0000

I had the same wish when I saw my results (with illegal being the trigger word, as well). Even a list of which words/phrases added to each category would be an improvement. Interested, I reran it immediately and got widely varying results. To get a more unique mark the persona processor obviously needs more time and less (immediate) visual flash to gather more unique information. Possibly they could ask for common usernames/pseudonyms as well to avoid false positives.

By: Joseph Jofish Kaye

Joseph Jofish Kaye — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:36:00 +0000

Yeah, mine looked like yours, basically. Maybe slightly less management. But it's one of those visualizations where the ratio of visualization to content is pretty damn low.