Personas is an interesting project at the Media Lab which takes your (or anyone else’s) name as input and then determines our personalities based on what it finds about us on the web, generating a graphical representation. This is my result:

…which I found rather disturbing: Fame, sports and religion seems to take way to much space here. The reason, of course, is that my name is rather common in Norway, and, for example, a formerly well known skier skews the results, even though I seem to be the most web-known person with that name.

Anyway, if you have a rare name, it might be accurate – and if your name is John Smith, you might be left with an average, possibly tilted a bit towards Pocahontas:

Anyway – try it out. You might be surprised. And please remember – this is an art project, not an accurate representation of anything…

Update September 20:I somehow forgot to point to Naomi Haque’s blog post about Personas, with discussion of how social networking changes our perception of self.