Blog writing reveals your type

Business Week reports on a new Web site called Typealyzer that will analyze your blog and tell you what it says about you.

Typealyzer is a research project to find out how language reflects a person’s psychological type and his or her motivations and interests. The site was created by Mattias Östmar of PRfekt, a Swedish media research and development company.

For two years, Östmar has been collecting sample texts from blogs, based on research about personality type and writing style. The site uses a tool to run a statistical analysis of the text to come up with a word frequency algorithm for different personality types.

After the blog is scanned, Typealyzer comes up with personality types derived from the Myers-Briggs model for looking at how people perceive the world and make decisions. However, the Business Week writer says that in some cases what Typealyzer says about the personality as reflected in the blog writing does not match the writer's personality type.

I submitted this blog to the Typealyzer site and it says I am a mechanic (see screenshot):



The above answer is rather far-fetched. The only time I did something mechanical was attending a three-month car-servicing and repair course conducted by the National University of Singapore's Extracurriculum Studies 20 years ago. Under the guidance of the instructor, the course participants were able to change oil and airconditioning fluid, replace brake linings, spark plugs, batteries and other essential components, and carry out most workshop repair and servicing. But a year after that, I could not remember a thing since my Japanese model car was problem-free and hence gave me no opportunity to practise my new skill.

I regard myself more a word mechanic or "wordsmith", someone who, for 30 years, has been cleaning up, simplifying, tightening, rejigging and clarifying other people's shitty writing for newspapers and magazines. In fact, I consider myself the best wordsmith and rewrite man in Singapore, and there is nobody's writing that I cannot improve on.

More on Typealyzer in Business Week