It’s a simple question really—what is your digital footprint?
The obvious first step most people would take would be to consult one of the mainstream search engines.
So sure, you can Google yourself, or if you are feeling particularly jaunty, give Bing a whirl.
Metasearch engines like Dogpile and Mamma can give a broader view, sometimes pulling in more obscure results.
Semantic search is the next step. Kosmix, Clusty and Primal Fusion are just three examples of this new way to search the web.
But if you want elegance and simplicity in the answer to our simple question, there is only one place to turn, Personas, an MIT-based project that began as an art installation.
The homepage is lovely, and, until a few days ago, looked like this:
But, this week, some explanatory text was added:
I have an uncommon last name, Maziarz, so if I do a web search on myself, the results are pretty focused, so I was interested to see what Personas came up with. I ran the search five times, and, interestingly, got five different answers.
The first, and my favorite, due to the outsized presence of the word “illegal,” is below:
I’m not sure where the “fashion” or the “religion” bars come from, but the rest were at least plausible. The other four times I ran the search, “news” continued to dominate (no surprise after 10 years in the newspaper biz), but illegal disappeared altogether and the other fat and thin bars varied.
As the Personas homepage notes, data mining techniques are growing more sophisticated by the day, meaning that even the most faint parts of your digital footprint are being scanned, collated and analyzed by government and corporate entities.
How does the web see you?
—Jonathan
@bentpiton
