Comments on: Online There’s More Than One of You

By: Aaron Zinman

Aaron Zinman — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:20:40 +0000

Glad you liked Personas as much as you did. Note, it is a critique of data mining and what happens when online history is as important as offline. Issues surrounding name collisions are a part of it. You are also missing it from its original museum context, where it is one piece among several others on a theme. I invite you to read the text in the application, as it goes into more depth about this, and has a link to a video of the installation.

Aaron

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:05:34 +0000

@Cathy I really like the term “geek-dentity” and I fully intend to plagiarise this in future.

I didn’t see any names other than mine though, which makes me rather curious about the methodology of collating name references and the algorithm which then mines those references.

I’m also wondering whether @Shaun had problems with his geek-dentity due to the numbers present within it, as I was able to use vicchi with no problems at all.

By: Cathy

Cathy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:46:02 +0000

I thought I really had a unique name – yes the tool seems to work mostly for people having unique names – but my former designer self was just very intrigued in the interface and the look and feel of the project. I found that extremely well-made on the loading phases, and I hope Zinman does have a way to track valuable user feedback like your blog post above.

Did you get to see a few columns of names apart from yours?

@Shaun I thought so too, I’ll probably have much more interesting results using my geek-dentity instead of real name but unfortunately that’s one word too.

By: Shaun McDonald

Shaun McDonald — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:26:21 +0000

It won’t let me use my typical username since it contains numbers and is only one word. There is some sports player in the states with the same name as been, hence it being completely skewed.