Comments on: Just who are you, anyway? Personas.

By: Susan Ferguson

Susan Ferguson — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:25:20 +0000

Weird, I typed in my name and two actual facts about me came up.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:26:22 +0000

LOL … awkwardly.

By: Don Smith

Don Smith — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 05:21:31 +0000

The last two statements it analyzed for me were a report of me having a stroke and then my obituary. Rather premature, I must say…

By: sinned34

sinned34 — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 18:49:38 +0000

Yay! I’ve apparently done a good job of keeping my personal name off the intertubes these last fifteen years. Although according to Personas I’m a professional magician, incredible public speaker, and manager of risk management at a major software company. I guess my meatspace name isn’t as rare as I thought.

By: Samantha Vimes

Samantha Vimes — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:43:32 +0000

I wish I *could* run it, because every time I’ve googled myself, I just get me. Apparently, I am unique. Both my meatspace and nom du net — (please don’t use my nom du net somewhere just to spoil it. 🙂 ) I’d like to either disprove or have another data point in favor of the uniqueness.

By: Kony

Kony — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:36:10 +0000

This is stupid. Apparently I don’t exist, and when I ran my boyfriend’s name several times for the hell of it, it came up with different results each time. I mean, I’m not the most technologically savvy person in the world, but it doesn’t seem like just a name would be enough to do anything even close to what it’s claiming to do. How exactly would it know which “john doe” you’re inquiring about if there are 2 million john does? And how would it be able to separate out different individuals’ information correctly?

By: Rose Colored Glasses

Rose Colored Glasses — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:28:31 +0000

Damn, as my real name I’m a band! With several albums out. And here I thought I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

Seriously, none of the mentions were of the real me, just name collisions.

By: Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:04:48 +0000

At least “Digital Cuttlefish” referred to me; my meatspace name, apparently, belongs solely to somebody else.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 17:03:55 +0000

Yeah, I Godwined it by entering Hitler. I don’t think the output is very interesting at the end, but the little paragraphs along the bottom are interesting. Especially if you are not smeared over the internet but your name is shared with two or three famous people (as is the case with my wife).

By: dargndorp

dargndorp — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 14:48:55 +0000

What a weird little exercise in data mangling.

If one inputs “Joseph Ratzinger” into the website, the strongest correlation is for sports. The website seems to consider all occurences of “Cardinal” as sports-related.

Which just goes to show that data mining without applied real-world knowledge can be quite stupid.