Next time you’re Twittering your thoughts, making a status post, or taking a quiz on Facebook, remember that not only are you creating part of an eternal online identity and probably sharing your information with more people than you thought (especially see question 3 in that ACLU quiz), you’re also helping shape marketing and political decisions. We’ve written jokingly about Googlewanking and Googlewashing before, but the two latest big things on the web – Social Media Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis – are making the web a different place. On the abstractly interesting side of this, sentiment analysis sort of renders the typical CNN or Time user poll (typically called a Voodoo Poll) even more absurd than they were. Online polls have always had major shortcomings, but the main one was that of limited demographic diversity, i.e.: only dorks who take CNN polls take CNN polls. A recent classic example of their susceptibility to gaming and inaccuracy was when “moot”, the 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, became the “World’s Most Influential Person” in a Time user poll. The difference with these newly evolving data mining tools is that they remove the obvious errors caused by selection bias or gaming by monitoring the unsolicited expressions of millions of users’ thoughts and feelings directly. On a personal level, another big difference is that whereas even a couple of years ago it took considerable effort to “dig through the noise” to find specific pieces of information, it is now routinely done on a large scale by companies competing aggressively in this arena (here’s a list of 10 of them, and here’s a much longer list) often to define or defend a brand. How this plays out for searching for information about individuals can be quickly demonstrated by services like 123people.com. Enter a name, and they quickly scour photos, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, weblinks, social network profiles, biographies, Instant Messenger, microblogs, blogs, news, and general documents to display info about a person conveniently on one page. This sort of thing is so easy to do that MIT student Aaron Zinman, for instance, built an art installation around the idea (thanks for the link, Hava). I’m not so concerned about this on a superfical level; thanks to all the other Ian Grays being such busybodies on the web, I’m semi-invisible in many of these searches, and I kind of like it that way. But what kind of online identity do you have?