Personas

Is a very interesting visualization experiment that takes internet mentions of someone’s name and runs the scads of data through an analysis that produces a virtual persona map. Here are a few I ran of myself and my various "personas" on the web.

First up is my most simplified name: John McElhenney (plenty of opportunities for inclusion of an civil-war era Presbyterian minister Rev. John McElhenney D. D., pro football Hall of Famer Hugh McElhenney and Hollywood writer and actor Rob McElhenney)

This is one of the screens of analysis as the program is working it’s magic. Interesting how #1 and #3 are about my musical career, and #2 is about someone else, unless my 6-yo daughter has something to tell me.

After the program chews away for a while here is the "persona" it generated for John McElhenney:

Interesting words pop out. Accident, religious, aggression, committees. Hmm. I might imagine the "religious" one could be attributed to the crossover with the honorable Rev.

I also ran one on my web persona, JMacofearth and here is what was generated:

And finally, the less ambiguous John Oakley McElhenney:

Interesting how as the persona is more refined, or directed at my "online" content, the online section begins to take over the graphic.

I have no idea how "military" is even in my persona, but okay.  Education, social, religion also cross over strongly. It’s an interesting way to see what your online voice might look like.

I also ran two major industry players who’s contrasting "voices" I thought might shed some insight into the process behind the application.

First my former employer and 15-year tech business connection, Michael Dell:

And the current tech visionary and leader, Steve Jobs:

I don’t understand much of what’s going on here, but some interesting notes.

Management: MD > SJ (2X)

Fashion: SJ > MD = 0

Aggression: MD > SJ=0

Professional: MD > SJ (5X)

Movies/Music: SJ > MD (7X)

Illegal: MD > SJ (2X)

I think it would be cool if we could stack the share of voice from Most to Least. Perhaps I’ll send Aaron Zinman a request. Or perhaps he’ll see this post and linkback to his tool. (grin)

And here let’s see how Aaron shows in his own tool.

His entire persona was generated from this block:

It was disintegrated? The Social Media Group was DISINTEGRATED! Holy cow. Well I hope Aaron still gets his degree completed. [Aaron Zinman, if there’s anything I can do, let me know.]

@jmacofearth

permalink: https://uber.la/2009/08/visualizing-the-web/ ‎