What Does the Internet Say About You?

A few months ago I made a post about a site called Wordle and how cool it was. One of the things I didn't talk about is how Wordle can quickly summarize a document for you by taking the most common words in the document and presenting them in a "wordle" with the most commonly used words largest. For instance, if you take the Health Care Bill currently being proposed by Congress and put it into Wordle you'll get sometehing like this:

Now I found a new website, 123people.com, that will do something similar. Put in a name, and the program will created a Wordle-like cloud based on common words found around that person's name in web pages. If you put my name in you'll see this:

It's not perfect, but it's kind of interesting. On the other hand, be warned: 123people.com is a website where I got a lot of the information for the post that I made a few days ago. If you go there, you may find there is more about you on the Internet than you'd ever want available. It's scary what conclusions a machine can draw about you in 10 seconds.