Personas is part of an exhibit  on display at the MIT Media Lab, it’s an installation from Aaron Zinman and it proposes to analyze your presence on the internet and create a visual profile based on that that analysis. Interestingly enough you can see the whole web crawling process taking place. Sadly there are at least two people out there with the same name as me with very distinct interests, so the results were somewhat correct but some categories are way off (sports and fashion are surely not part of my personal profile on the internet)

(click on pictures for full view)

So if my name isn’t unique enough, I wondered if Freelance Samurai is…

It’s really not. I noticed during the aquiring of data that the fact that there is a classic movie with that same name (Kenji Misumi’s 1957 “Momotaro Zamurai”) threw the analysis way off.

It’s a very interesting exercise on online identity, and I’d love to see this mashed up a bit (ie: why is ’sports’ there, where did it acquire such information), and perhaps a pre analysis of the data requesting some input from the user (“is this really you? should I include data from this site in the analysis?)

After previewing the post I had to redo the pictures and the analysis… sadly the results differed from the original pictures quite a bit, so if you run it twice, be prepared…