Find out your favourite blogger’s Myers-Briggs personality type with Typealyzer

Thanks to Karen Loasby* and her Favourite Tipples from FreePint from 22nd January 2009 for highlighting Typealyzer.

The (currently beta) service is a text a text classifier that analyses any blog and assigns a Myers-Briggs personality to it based on writing style.

“Typealyzer.com is developed by the happy people @ prfekt.se. Illustrations are made by Sol at Accented. Please also visit our Typealyzer group at Google!. If you want API access for R&D, try free text classification or use psychographic analysis for commercial purposes – please visit PRfekt at uClassify!

How does it work? For a long period of time, we have been training our system to recognize texts that characterize the different types. The system, typealyzer, can now by itself find features that distinguishes one type from another. When all features, words and sentences, are statistically analysed, Typealyzer is able to guess which personality type the text represents.

I have tested it on a some of my favourite blogs (and mine of course) and come up with some interesting results.

My colleague Steve van Dulken who writes about the world of inventions and how it interacts with business, the media and patents, is ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers. “The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever. The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.”

Stephen Bury  (Curator of the Breaking The Rules exhibition and blog) is ISTP – The Mechanics. “The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts. The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.@

SurprisinglyEuan Semple a leader in the field of Social Computing with thousands of followers on The Obvious blog is also classified as ISTJ – The Duty Fulfillers.

Stephen Abram previous President of SLA and thought leader for Libraries 2.0 through his blog Stephen’s Lighthouse, will be pleased to hear he is INTP – The Thinkers. “The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

Finally, I am rather pleased to be able to report that this blog also falls into the the INTP category… remembering of course that it is all just a bit of fun.

thinker

* Karen Loasby is an Information Architect for the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) and Contributing Editor of the FUMSI Manage practice area. Karen was previously Information Architecture Team Leader in the BBC’s Future Media & Technology department, managing a team of 16 information architects. She is a regular presenter at information architecture conferences and writes about information architecture and creativity at www.iaplay.com. Karen can be reached at karen.loasby@fumsi.com

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