Less surprising than being told that my blog was written by a man, but still creepy is Typealyzer. It personality types your blog, Myers-Briggs style. Mine was 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.”
I’m with Alex in wondering how they got that from my blog.
Adam Reed wrote an article in 2005, ‘My Blog Is Me’, where he explains that blogging, unlike other forms of text production, is an activity that is “explicitly concerned with substituting texts for persons.” Apparently this isn’t the case for Typealyzer–it states “writing style on a blog may have little or nothing to do with a person´s self-perceived personality.” True in my case–I’m not INTP, but I know that some of my personality seeps into this blog. So, it’s not ‘My blog is me’, but ‘My blog is an extension of a part of me’ which, in spite of the title, is what Reed describes throughout the article. The more qualified title isn’t quite as catchy, though.
Work referred to in post:
Reed, Adam 2005 ‘My Blog Is Me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and Anthropology). Ethnos 70(2):220-242.
Yes most definitely. And in this case your blog (I’m guessing) is mostly an extension of your academic self, which would explain the ‘logical and analytical’ aspect of it.
By the way, Reed also wrote a second interesting article on blogs:
Reed, Adam. 2008. ‘Blog This’: surfing the metropolis and the method of London. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 2: 391-406. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00508.x .
yes, that article was quite helpful in terms of understanding types of blogs that fall into different categories from my own. I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for more from Reed but haven’t seen anything