Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Behind, before, above, between, below

To protect the supersecret of your identity maybe you mulitplex yourself, and go online in a multitude of different places; but maybe there is automated author profiling software that crawls the web for "who else writes like" your blog, and creates a nice chronological flowchart of what you've been up to.. Naturally, the more you say the more accurate will be the chart.

Even if this precise software doesn't exist, it almost could. Artist-cum-computer-scientist Jonathan Harris (pictured) has a project called 'We Feel Fine' which...

"...scans the world's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes searching for occurences of the phrases 'I feel' and 'I am feeling' and when it finds one of those phrases it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author.." (video)

and then animates the feelings. Now as it happens Harris is incredible, and his project exhilarating. Nevertheless.. over time the more you say the less potential anonymity you will have - even if the software doesn't get better, which it will. Any sockpuppetry can only take you so far.

Did I mention Harris' project automatically extracts your photos too, and captions it with your sentence.? Now, altogether: "I am feeling altogether.."


Does this matter? Well, it might actually be a non-issue: people want to be recognised, and the web allows reputations to be built. Which is a good thing, because this openness is surely integral to any "Library 2.0" concept. In fact there are plenty self-identified librarians on the web, though perhaps not here exactly.

Which reminds me, I must be off. Got a tiddlywinks tournament to attend, and a knit-off, cat-show, seance..

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