Toon Vanagt's Thought Valve
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Why I like my MIT data portrait and why you should get yours
August 22nd, 2009
Personas Data Portrait Toon Vanagt
Tonight I stumbled upon this MIT personas project, which generates a real time data portrait of your online identity. Apart from being a cool data visualization project, I think it is a great illustration of large dataset processing and an educative warning for on-line privacy. During the processing of one’s character the most information is shown. I was stunned by the animation and personalized content generated by the flash application. It seems I grew up with my pants down 
“Personas uses sophisticated natural language processing and shows you how the Internet sees you.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
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.”
If you’ve left traces on the internet and aren’t  cursed/blessed with on-line homonyms, you’ll be stunned by how much the internet knows about you. Enter first name & last name here to share feelings about your generated portrait belowÂ
Could catastrophic signatures undermine Gmail’s business model?
July 31st, 2009
I ran into this post on ‘How to avoid ads in Gmail’ and wondered if catastrophic e-mail signatures could ruin the Google Gmail revenue model (which is 100% advertizing based). Google does not want to mix the messages of its advertisers with catastrophic news in your inbox. So their advertising engine scan for “sensitive” words to make sure no ads are shown next to disturbing content. Just imagine a future popular habit where e-mail users add an “adblock footer” to their messages. Would Google change its courtesy policy or find way to distinguish real world accidents (by monitoring real time search results on news sites and social networks)? Think about ‘alarming’ footer statements in the line of:
- “Webmail Adblock footer: These words are designed to kill advertisements“
- “This footer cleans your interface from adverts: Remember that mail bomb you dropped in public. It made so many victims… they were scattered all over the office floor. Although that might also have happened after you Rickrolled my colleagues.”
-  P.S. Since too many people died during treatment, the World Health Organization decided to stop the distribution of the influenza A H1N1 swine flu vaccine and is now trying to make a vaccine to kill the bad joke pandemic that has arisen from the craze.
Joe McKay further observed:“If the message runs long Google turns the ads back on, however, if you add another “sensitive” word they go off again. After extensive testing I’ve discovered you need 1 catastrophic event or tragedy for every 167 words in the rest of the email. I usually toss in a couple extra for good measure. “
I look forward to receiving your catastrophic messages, feel free to add suggestions in the section below. My comment spam filter will enjoy labeling themÂ
Halleluia, may doom descent on my inbox.
About Me
Internet entrepreneur. Proud founder of Casius.com, Virtualisers.be, Virtualization.com, Promex.be and 2 sons. Not necessarily in that order. Read more...
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