1. What is Personos?

Personos is software for collecting and organizing your subset of the web.

2. What can you do with Personos?

• Create 'people profiles'-- collect all of a person's social networks, blogs, and links in one place
• Bookmark articles and video and tag them into people and topic bins.
• Organize people into groups and view their aggregate links.
• 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Googling a person involves a significant filtering task-- sifting through articles about others with the same name and out-of-date articles to get to the important stuff.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 a community sharing their googling work instead of working alone. to create 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 (with optional restrictions)

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. Personos is a site for performing and recording research. The focus is a person's public internet addresses-- their home pages, blogs, feeds, and links.

8. Is Personos a people tagging site like tagalag?

Yes. With Personos a person can be put 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 content management tool like Plone?

Kind of. Personos allows for direct editing of personal and group (departmental) profile pages in a wysiwyg fashion, and it combines this with a searchable web link repository to which the community can post. Personos is not for creating web pages with arbitrary layout and content. Because of this, contributors need not learn a separate tool, as with systems like Plone or Collage, and one can edit a page's content directly and immediately when viewing it (with password authorization). This directness, along with ease of use, is the key to getting people to actually contribute information!

10. Is Personos a wiki like Google Sites?

Kind of. Personos provides wiki-like editing within personal and group profiles. It does not allow for the creation of pages with arbitrary content, as a wiki does, which is advantageous when a standard look and feel is desired. It also makes editing easier-- more like filling out fields in a form. The key feature that separates Personos from a wiki, however, is how social bookmarking is integrated. This feature allows the community to post content to pages with a single click, as they browse. Wiki-like profile editing combined with social bookmarking leads to a very dynamic and up-to-date web presence.

11. Is Personos a single web site?

No. Personos software can be configured for any organization or topic domain. Deployed Domains include the University of San Francisco's Live Directory, a directory of California Politicos and one for David Wolber's favorite writers. Would you like a domain for your organization or topic interest? Contact us-- it can be accomplished within hours.