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Visual Map of Your Name's Online Presence
- Titanous 17y agoTry using "Paul Graham". The visualization is quite interesting.
- marstall 17y agoin what way? There was a set of google result snippets for the query 'paul graham' surrounded by a bunch of flashy graphics
- embeddedradical 17y agoPaul 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"
- diiq 17y agoNeat. 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?
- fretje 17y agoIt will be me, but... I. Don't. Get. It.
- rrival 17y agoThis is helpful: http://personas.media.mit.edu/ http://personas.media.mit.edu/ Would be great to see a profile comparison feature.
- shaddi 17y agoVery 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- kevindication 17y agoBleh: "Express Install is not supported on this operating system."
- Flemlord 17y agoWithout 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"?
- sangaya 17y agoI 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."
- Goladus 17y agoWe don't even know what "Art" means according to the experiment, much less how you got there.
- liquidben 17y agoI'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.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoBecause it's not 'you' it's every person who shares your name.
- 17y ago
- lucraft 17y agoSeems 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" ??
- unavoidable 17y agoUh 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.
- Goladus 17y agoI 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.
- TweedHeads 17y agoCall me back when it computes the results in less than a couple of seconds.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- randallsquared 17y agoAs 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).
- okeumeni 17y agoI dont see a thing!
- bcl 17y agoPretty 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 17y agoI 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.
- marstall 17y agosorry 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.
- blhack 17y agoI 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- siculars 17y agoi 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.
- sp332 17y agoYeah, 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# http://www.paterva.com/web4/index.php/client# ?
- zipstudio 17y agocompletely wrong in my case.
- zngtk4 17y agoI repeated this three times with my name. It gave me completely different results each time...
- eznet 17y ago4 times here - completely different each time... Only thing consistent was it said that I went to the University of Tennessee, which I did not...
- cruise02 17y agoHaving 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.
- trezor 17y agoDoesn'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.
- alex_c 17y agoAll I see is "increase your window size please".
- jazz 17y agoSame thing here, on a 800x480 Eee PC screen...
- SingAlong 17y agosame here. i'm on 1280 x 720. widescreen Anyone else got this working?
- edw519 17y agoMy 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.
- indiejade 17y agoIf 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.
- Titanous 17y agoFrom 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.
- edward 17y agoOn my netbook it just says "increase your window size please". The screen resolution on the MSI Wind is 1024x600.
- blhack 17y agoPut your online identity in for a much more interesting visualization. I used "blhack", and it was much more accurate and interesting to watch.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tokenadult 17y agoI get a stupid "increase your window size please" message when I visit the link. Not ready for prime time.
- rationalbeaver 17y agoMy 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 17y agoi 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.
- ackack 17y agoI find it interesting that no matter who i search for i get 'no digital traces found'.
- JacobAldridge 17y agoThe ultimate insult in an online world?
- mrlebowski 17y agoCome on, its not even a Friday today, its just a tool that looks pretty and makes no sense. Oh yeah, very suitable for HN.
- elai 17y agoTakes the top 3 google results and associates semi-arbritary categorys to certain words.