What Your Blog Reveals About You

I’ve just discovered a fun little tool called Typealyzer: it reads your blog entries, then reveals which personality type you are … or which persona you write as, which may or may not be the same thing, of course.

I stumbled onto this in Rachel King’s BusinessWeek article, What Your Blog Says About You.

Just for grins, I tried it both ways: letting Typealyzer read my blog, then taking a version of the Myers-Briggs personality test on which it is based.

Typealyzer’s Interpretation

According to Typealyzer, the persona reflected by what I’ve written here in this blog is the Myers-Briggs “ESTP”, meaning Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving, characterized as “Do-ers,” or “Artisan Promoters”.

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. [Yep.]

They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time. [Nope, not if I’m knitting. And listening to an audiobook. And the TV’s on … ]

An alternate interpretation from Keirsey.com:

Artisans are most at home in the real world of solid objects that can be made and manipulated, and of real-life events that can be experienced in the here and now. [Absolutely.]

Artisans have exceptionally keen senses, and love working with their hands. They seem right at home with tools, instruments, and vehicles of all kinds, and their actions are usually aimed at getting them where they want to go, and as quickly as possible. [I have to make things, I can’t help it. I love gadgets. And tools? Home Depot is my favorite store.]

Thus Artisans will strike off boldly down roads that others might consider risky or impossible, doing whatever it takes, rules or no rules, to accomplish their goals. [On occasion I have done, yes.]

Direct Personality Test

Then I took the personality test here, by answering a series of questions. This result was “ENTJ”, meaning Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging, characterized as the “Fieldmarshal”.

• "I don't care to sit by the window on an airplane. If I can't control it, why look?" [Exactly.]

The ENTJ requires little encouragement to make a plan: "I make these little plans that really don't have any importance to anyone else, and then feel compelled to carry them out." [I make “little plans” constantly. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly; even 5-year and 10-year-plans.]

And then there’s this version of who the ENTJ persona is, from Keirsey.com:

Hardly more than two percent of the total population, Fieldmarshals are bound to lead others. In some cases, they simply find themselves in charge of groups, and are mystified as to how this happened. [That would be me.]

But the reason is that they have a strong natural urge to give structure and direction wherever they are - to harness people in the field and to direct them to achieve distant goals. They cannot not build organizations, and cannot not push to implement their goals.

Although Fieldmarshals are tolerant of established procedures, they can and will abandon any procedure when it can be shown to be ineffective in accomplishing its goal.

They are ever intent on reducing bureaucratic red tape, task redundancy, and aimless confusion in the workplace. Fieldmarshals root out and reject ineffectiveness and inefficiency, and are impatient with repetition of error. [Absolutely true, it drives me mad.]

Unappealingly Napoleonic as this second description may sound, I have to admit it is shockingly spot-on, insofar as dealing with groups of people is concerned.

I wonder if the difference between the two test sets is that my writing is public, and my test answers are ostensibly private? Or that the so-called “extravert” and “thinking” traits that turned up in both tests are the two I can’t hide no matter what? Hmmm.

Anyway, if you’ve got a blog, go try these yourself. I’m sure reading your own results will be infinitely more interesting than reading mine!

Have fun,

--MaggieBelize
Designer, kNotes for kNitters
Sandia Park, NM