Finding your online personality
If you've ever worried how much information there is about you online, it's probably best you stay away from the latest project from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Called Personas, it asks you to enter your name, then scours the web looking for information about you.
By analysing this, it builds up a graphical representation of your online life and personality, showing how much time you've spent on various categories, such as music, education, and intriguingly, a category called 'illegal'. It also gives you an estimation of your online fame.
The inventors, who claim it is an art project rather than a serious tool, say it can show how your internet history can be scoured to create an online personality for you. "It uses language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity," its developers say. "In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you."
The results are interesting, although a little vague - the biography it created for me, for instance, put me in a job I left over six years ago. However, in other areas it really does reflect what you do online - my slight music obsession shone through, for instance, and apparently the odd search for Cardiff City results and elusive Wales six nations tickets also qualifies me as an online sports fan.
It may be worryingly close to the celebrity cult of googling yourself at every opportunity, but MIT has succeeded in its aim to show that, whether we like it or not, what we do online really does leave a permanent mark.
You can try personas here



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