Pretty interesting peice on avatars in New Scientist:

For now, Lifenaut relies on a series of personality tests, teaching sessions and uploaded personal material such as photos, videos and correspondence. The result, Mayer says, will be an avatar that looks like you, talks like you and will be able to describe key events in your life, such as your wedding day. But how far can such technology go? How much of your personality and knowledge can be reproduced by a computer? Can we ever hope to use avatars to resurrect the dead?

This seems like the perfect application for information stored in the online social networking databases like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Imagine chronicling your whole life with a user interface that is basically transparent (at least for those purposes), which is then decoded using an incredibly large algorithm to determine your personality type, speech patterns, likes, dislikes, etc.

How realistic do you think an avatar could become?