MIT's Personas Project

Here's a fascinating new project from MIT:

What is Personas
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

How Does it Work?
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.

Venn Diagram in Search of Accurate Information on the Internet

A little humor from Bunny Comics.

Internet Visualization from AT&T Labs

AT&T Labs is doing some very interesting things with network visualization. I came across this graphic on Flickr, but can't find the original version on AT&T Labs' site, but I certainly wish I could find out more information about it.

The Internet in 1901

Here's a map of the earliest form of the internet, sourced from Tom Standage's blog post. It maps telegraph lines in 1901.

iA Webtrend Map 2009

iA's fourth version of their web trend map is here! I've posted on previous versions in the past: V3, V2

Keyword Mapping

KWMap is an interesting site that applies visualization to help us identify better keywords for web searches. Basically, you enter a keyword to start, which appears at the intersection of two strands of related keywords. From there you can select any of the related keywords to "recenter" a new list of keywords. The visualization itself is not dynamic (i.e. it always shows your keyword on the continuum of the same two strands), but is somehow much more appealing than other keyword generation sites.

Akamai Visualizations

Akamai, a company providing platforms for global internet content, has some interesting visualizations of dimensions of the internet including traffic, latency, performance and attacks. The map above shows traffic using a real-time heat-map style display.

From their site:
Akamai handles 20% of the world's total Web traffic, providing a unique view into what's happening on the Web - what events are generating traffic, how much, from where, and why....get a feel for the world's online behavior at any given moment - how much rich media is on the move, the sheer volume of data in play, the number and concentration of worldwide visitors, and average connection speeds worldwide.