Internet’s picture of Sri Lanka

If Sri Lanka was a person, the image below is how she (or he) would look like on the internet. Discovered it while on an “internet break” at work.

From the image above the person called Sri Lanka is quite talked about. The big surprise is the politics and sports (the 2 main topics) are dwarfed by a swarth of other topics. Unexpectedly management and education are the third and fourth topics. Sri Lanka is full of surprises on?

The image is a screen shot of the graphic created by an online software/application called Personas which attempts to characterise a person based on information about them on the web. Personas (information aesthetics has a quickly digestible overview ) is one of the many projects flowing from the MIT media lab. I’m going to lazily (and correctly) assume that the details of how if works is beyond me. Most likely it will require me to use unused parts of my brain (if they are there).

However using Personas is easy as Googling. Watch for the snippets of texts that it grabs as it toils away. Give Personas a go and let me know what you dug up on your country/city/province/spot on the planet. You know you need the break (the productive things can wait a few seconds longer).

A lot has been said about data mining and identity profiling on the web. Running persona on a country does put a whole new twist to how the internet characterises identity.