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 Aaron Zinman, a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, 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?…
