1. What is Personos?
Personos is software for creating collaborative people directories.
2. What can you do with Personos?
- Collect people's social networks, blog, and articles in one place
- Create collections of people and articles. Collections generally represent organizations or topics.
- Bookmark web articles into people bins-- the system automatically finds names in the document
- Help build your organization's people-centric subset of the web
- Find information about topics and people-- Personos is a great starting point for people research
3. Why not just use Google?
Googling a person involves a significant filtering task-- sifting through articles about others with the same name and out-of-date articles to get to the important stuff. Personos is about everyone sharing their googling work instead of working alone. It also allows you to find people and articles by association as opposed to just keyword search, and it provides a filtered view of the web.
4. Is Personos a social networking site?
No. Personos is NOT a social networking site. It is a people research site, more like a modern day address book than a date or job finding site.
A key practical difference is that, with social networking sites, you can only add information about yourself, whereas with Personos you add information about others.
5. Is Personos a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us?
Yes. With Personos you can bookmark articles and tag them like with del.icio.us. You can also mark articles as being about or authored by a person or persons, something we call people marking an article. Whereas del.icio.us has allowed for the creation of a subject catalog of the web, Personos allows for the creation of author and person-as-subject catalogs of the web. You can go to any person's Personos page and see all the articles that he or others have marked as being about or by him. Together with a person's blog and social network profiles, this provides an aggregated view of a person's on-line identity.
6. Is Personos a blog reader like bloglines?
Yes. With Personos you can specify the blog and feed of each person, and view the feed at the person's page. You can also create groups of people, and when you view that group see the blog posts of all members sorted by date-- an aggregate blog.
7. Is Personos an address book like Plaxo?
No. Plaxo is an on-line system for storing and retrieving traditional address information-- phone, street address, email. Personos is a site for performing and recording research. For privacy reasons, no traditional information is allowed. Instead, you can add a person's public internet addresses-- their home pages, blogs, and bookmark addresses.
8. Is Personos a people tagging site like tagalag?
Yes. With Personos you can put a person in any number of groups, which is basically the same as people tagging. groups are different than tags in that they are not just text but are entities with information of their own-- a home page, a blog, etc.
9. Is Personos a single web site?
No. Personos is actually a suite of sites focusing on various domains. Domains include one for San Francisco politics, one for the people of the University of San Francisco and one for Writers Would you like a domain for your organization or topic interest? Contact us-- it can be accomplished within days.