DO YOU get irritated by egosurfers, addicted to Googling their own name? Then get them to try a data-mining tool called Personas, and they may be in for a surprise.
Devised by , a PhD student at the , Personas runs a Yahoo search on a name you give it, and extracts statements from the results. Using a natural-language processing algorithm it then builds a profile of the subject by linking words in the statements with 28 topics defined by Zinman, including “online”, “travel”, “education” and “professional”.
Will your egosurfers get an accurate profile? Probably not, as it will be based on data for everyone who shares the target name.
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And that, says Zinman, is precisely the point. He describes Personas as “a critique on data mining”, intended to highlight the misplaced faith some have in the computer analysis of large data sets. “It’s always presented so authoritatively,” he says, “when in reality what’s happening behind the scenes is controlled voodoo.”
Personas is part of an exhibit at the MIT Museum called , looking at life in the information-rich world. It can also be reached at
