Typealyzer analyses your blog to deduce your Myers Briggs personality type. This blog came out with exactly my MBTI personality type:
INTP – The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy 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.
Big Circumstance 
Well, it’s got me pegged as a “ISTP – The Mechanics”, which seems partly accurate, but unfortunately I’ve never done the test personally, so who knows.
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I’ve taken MBTI twice. The first time I was INTJ, the second time INTP – which rather breaks the rules of supposedly having a personality type that doesn’t change. However, on reading the general descriptions, my tendencies are closer to the latter, so I follow that result.
The only problem is, after posting this, I analysed my old blog (much of which I imported here), and it came out as ISTP. I don’t quite fit the ‘mechanic’ description, though.
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It types my blog as INTP too and I’m INFJ.
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I wonder how much it gets affected by other people’s comments? Just a thought …
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The main problem I have with this is the picture of an Apple laptop, which I chose not to post. Dare I suggest that no true thinker would think that a good choice of computer?
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Well, yes, as a Windows user who has occasionally tried to use Ubuntu Linux, I heartily agree! Apple Macs would be attacked by script kiddies as much as Microsoft, if they had the dominance in the market that MS has. It’s an attack on power. (I declare an interest: my brother-in-law is a Tech Support Manager with MS, supporting servers to corporate clients.)
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I wonder how much it gets affected by other people’s comments? Just a thought …
Don’t know. I expect it must actually analyse individual words rather than concepts.
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Yes, I guess it must be words more than concepts. Presumably parts of speech, vocabulary, etc., which could be skewed by other contributors. There is a FAQ here, which refers to statistical analysis of words and sentences (but that’s a bit vague). The actual technology used is supposedly found here, but it came up as a broken link when I tried to click through. So that wasn’t too helpful!
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There is now an explanation of how it works here, with some further speculation here. There is nothing about parts of speech and vocabulary, simply a measure of how similar the site is to a probably small number of reference sites.
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Peter,
I’m glad you didn’t suffer the broken link problem I hit. Obviously you’ve managed to get through to the information we need. The first link you provide raises the question of text classification, such as ‘food’. There must be quite a leap from classifying text in that kind of way to taking a punt at someone’s personality type. Your second reference contains some quite damning evidence: for someone whose upcoming sabbatical was partly going to explore issues of ministry and personality type, I feel some rethinking coming on!
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Well, Dave, I didn’t intend to endorse the criticism of the principle of personality typing, only the criticism of this highly inaccurate way of measuring it. I’m sure ministry and personality type is a worthwhile field of study if not taken too seriously.
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No, I didn’t take you that way. It was one of the links you supplied. It was an eye-opener!
BTW, it was good to meet you at lunch-time, albeit briefly!
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Yes, it was good to meet you. I hope you enjoyed your lunch. I enjoyed smelling it but had to content myself with soup and bread. I suppose being a Reverend deserves a few privileges.
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If you want to get a group of ministers together, offer them food! I trust you’re joking about us deserving privileges! 🙂
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I thought that was just my minister! Well, I’ll go for the leftover pizza tomorrow.
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Of course, it’s a diary problem really. Appointments often fall into the morning/afternoon/evening categories. Since we’re not American, we don’t want breakfast meetings. Evening meal is family time. So that leaves lunch. Ah, food, did you say? Well, by some miracle I am free. 🙂 Seriously, your church was very generous in the amount of food it supplied us today – much more than strictly necessary for a group our size.
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It was only what a vicar our size thought strictly necessary! He knows how to win hearts and minds through stomachs. I don’t mean to suggest he was trying to manipulate people, just make and keep friends. A little bit of generosity goes a long way.
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Oh absolutely, it was certainly generous. I wouldn’t wish to suggest anything else.
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Hi there! I came across this post through my Google Alerts for the word “MBTI.” This may or may not be of interest to you, but I write a blog about the MBTI and wrote a post about how Typealyzer is basically junk. I know lots of people are checking it out for entertainment sake- and that’s totally cool…but I hope you don’t confuse those “blog type” results for your own personality type. Anyway, I won’t go into why the site is junk here, I just wanted to let you know if you wanted to learn more, here’s the original post: http://www.thembtiblog.com/2008/11/websites-that-ruin-my-day.html.
I also have a discussion in the comments section with the creator of the Typealyzer site.
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Breanne,
Thank you. The more I think about Typealyzer the more I agree with you. It’s fun, but not meant to be taken seriously. Initially,as I guess my post suggests, I was struck by how it came out with the same MBTI type that I believe accurately describes me. However, what I don’t think I’ve mentioned is that since then I have also fed my old blog through it. That came out as ISTP. I only changed to this blog in August, and imported three years’ worth of posts from the old one here, so they were included when this blog was analysed.
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