SYBIL: Multiple Personalities on the Web

Denis McDonald has an excellent comment on peoplicious and other aggregators/expert systems, concerning the fact that a person/blog is often about many topics, and most tools don’t allow for multiple personalities. Here’s an excerpt:

Weaknesses include possible deficiencies in tagging the content of individual entries that are read into Peoplicious via the RSS feed that supplies the source blog’s information. For example, all my recent blog postings are included in the entries under “expert systems,” even those that have nothing to do with expert location or expertise management.

The flip side of the above is that the reader is exposed to things he or she might not otherwise be exposed to; making “people tagging” the basis for the grouping of items is a valuable approach.

Blog input tools provide categories to help organize one’s multiple personalities. However, aggregators, at least peoplicious, only let a user tag an entire person into a list, and there is no way to specify that a person has multiple areas of interest.

So we might think of allowing a single person to be subdivided, different feeds be set for the different personalities (given their blog input tool allows for different feeds for different categories), and then allow personalities instead of full persons to be added to lists (tagged). Then I could put Dennis McDonald:Expert Systems into  the Expert Systems folder.

Would this be too complicated? Are people not ready to admit multiple personality disorder? If only Freud were alive…