Personas is an interesting installation from some folks at MIT that takes your first and last name and then uses your online presence to develop a high level persona for you. You can see mine above.
Here’s their description of how it works:
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.
I need to play around with this more but on the surface, it seems pretty neat. It practically loses all value if you don’t have a unique name (by Google’s standards).
Try it out and see what you think.