Visual Map of Your Name's Online Presence

I was also perplexed by this as several categories didn't seem to fit me at all. I was also shocked by a rather large section marked "illegal". Thanks to a link below from rrival, the philosophy behind the program is a mix of art and social awareness. We all expect computers to be infallible giving a precise characticture of ourselves from data. However, the computer is intrinsically unaware of many human traits and can't differentiate appropriately. Judging from my own reactions and those of others thus far, we haven't yet grasped this concept.

The philsophy: "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."

We don't even know what "Art" means according to the experiment, much less how you got there.

I'm a little disturbed by the presence of "accident" and "aggression" in my results. I haven't the faintest clue as to what I've done to deserve that.

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

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.

I came here to say exactly this...

The actual search probably takes only several microseconds and was probably trivial to write compared the to the pretty visualization.

Yeah, much too much "art." I wonder what it would be like with better backend intelligence-gathering software, like Maltego http://www.paterva.com/web4/index.php/client# ?

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.

Uh oh. They're on to you!

Anyway, I don't think it's all that accurate in categorization. They seem to pick up keywords and label them as some arbitrary category they've defined the word as. I showed up close to 15% in Fashion and I work in Infrastructure Engineering with a dab of Software.

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.

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...

in what way? There was a set of google result snippets for the query 'paul graham' surrounded by a bunch of flashy graphics

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"

same here. i'm on 1280 x 720. widescreen

Anyone else got this working?

Same thing here, on a 800x480 Eee PC screen...

My desktop is set up the way I want it. Otherwise it wouldn't be set up this way. Duh.

If a site doesn't work with my preferences, I click my back button and never come back.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The ultimate insult in an online world?