Typalyzer is a tool that’s gotten bandied about the blogosphere recently, and not surprisingly. Given the URL of any blog, it will analyze it and then offer a classification—a sort of psychological work-up—of that blog’s author(s). Here’s what it had to say about the writers of our blog:

INTJ – The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it—often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

We like to think that some of that’s pretty accurate. The categories the tool uses are drawn from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which isn’t exactly considered a credible or rigorous method these days, but can still be a bit of fun (as in this case). That’s what the letters in our classification are from, they stand for “Introversion, iNtuition, Thinking, Judging.” When it’s put that way, it might be a little less flattering. However it’s nice to be called special, and members of this group are supposedly among the rarest (there are 16 groups in total), making up less than 1% of the population. In addition to “the scientist,” INTJs are also sometimes called “the free-thinker” or “the strategist,” characterizations we consider potentially a bit more appropriate.

On a bit more serious of a note, the company ultimately behind this tool is doing some pretty interesting work 1) on social media as well as 2) in social media:

1. This project is the creation of a Swedish company called PRfekt. They claim to offer “psychographic blog analysis” and describe their clients as:

   PR Professionals identify key bloggers, measure and track attitude and follow trends and issues in buzz in the blogosphere

   Planners and Strategic Marketers with campaign development and campaign tracking

   Site owners track how their content is spread among bloggers, thus identifying and creating psychological insight about what motivates and triggers different audiences

   Turns out that what they do actually has a lot in common with what we do. It’s interesting to see programming work being done in the social media space that’s not really targeted at consumers so much as practitioners. Aside from SEO and Web analytics tools, there’s not a lot that falls into that category.

2. So their technical work is work on social media (if blogs are a social medium, then “blog analysis” is analysis of an example of social media) but that’s not the same as doing social media.

   However, the way they’ve gotten themselves out there certainly is. We’re posting about them and so are a lot of other people. That’s because they packaged their technology in a fashion likely to disseminate across the Web. No one should be surprised that bloggers like playing with tools that tell them things about their own blogs, they (we?) can be a rather self-indulgent bunch. And if it appeals to bloggers, it’s likely to get blogged about…

   PRfekt is the company all the way at the back, technological end of all this. Between them and the blogosphere that’s playing with their technology is uClassify, a free, creative commons licensed site that lets users use an API to design their own text analysis frameworks. The site provides Typalyzer as a fun example, as well as Genderanalyzer, a similar tool that attempts to determine the gender of a blog’s author. This one might be the even bigger social media success story: it got picked up by BoingBoing, which drove so much traffic to Genderanalyzer that the server failed. That’s some solid free publicity.

There’s even more going on here: uClassify is working on a prototype version of its technology for determining if a blog is in fact a splog (”splog” are short for “spam blog”—an artificially created blog used to inflate search rankings of other sites) and not the original work of a real blogger. That work and their API that allows users to generate their own text analysis tools are both pretty interesting. Maybe we’ll find the time to try our hand at our own custom text analyzer and report on the results.

But all that aside, Typalyzer and Genderanalyzer have managed to get a fair amount of attention by appealing to people who use social media (bloggers) with something that does something fun with social media (their blogs). After all, if you have a blog, aren’t you going to go try one of them now? And if you have a blog, why wouldn’t you go ahead and blog about it…