The other day I was watching a movie of my life. Well, sort of. Courtesy of Peter Kim who pointed to this experiment by MIT PhD student Aaron Zinman, I got to peek into the process of how his algorithm analyses my digital footprint:
Wow, a lot of old activity, and I’m really surprised how often I got quoted in Italian, French and German languages – who would have thought? In the end, here’s the result:
Hm… a bit surprising, to say the least. It gave me a fairly big chunk of Sports, of which I doubt I’ve ever written a single word – and what’s this Accident category? (I’m not even pointing to Illegal:-) ) Oh, well, let’s test a bit more. Here’s @Kirshnan’s Persona:
Hm, he seems to have the same Sports and Accident bars. Let’s see more. Guest Author and celebrity VC / Blogger Mark Suster:
I guess no matter who you are, Sports and Accident are mandatory categories:-) Let’s expand the circle now, here’s TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington:
Wow, a huge dose of Accident and quite a bit of Illegal… do I want to know more?
Next up is Google’s Sergey Brin:
Even more Illegal and a fair bit of Accident. (Ahh, I knew I was right not buying $GOOG for $80 at the IPO, it was all just an accident:) ). Perhaps we should leave tech. Ladies and Gentlemen (no, actually, Girls), here’s Justin Bieber:
Hm.. so Bieber Mania is an Accident? Let’s venture into politics:
Well, at least President Obama got a bit more Politics, but… hm… let’s just say he got less Illegal and Accident than Justin Bieber:-)
So what does it all mean? Here’s the money quote from the site FAQ:
THIS WAS NOT USEFUL
It was not meant to be. Read the Background section.
If you do, you’ll find out it is an experiment focusing on giving a peek into the process rather than the final result. It does not aim at precision. So forget the results, focus on the fun, and enjoy your own movie here.


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