What your blog tells about you

One of the attractions of studying in a big university is that you get seminars and talks from people all around the world, from all sorts of interesting disciplines like psychology, linguistics, astronomy, etc. About a couple of weeks back, we had a very interesting talk by Dr. Scott Nowson from the Centre for Lanugage Technologies at Macquaire University in Australia. The topic of the talk was, "The Secret Language of Blogs: It's not WHAT you did, it's HOW you blogged it". Among other things, his research focuses on "linguistic analysis to explore personality and gender difference in the language of weblogs" [quoted from his homepage]. Needless to say, I didn't need a second invitation to go for the talk!

The results and the conclusions he presented were based on the analysis of 71 blogs, recorded over a single month. All of them had answered and passed around some meme which was a 41 point psychology questionnaire to determine the profiles of the people participating. So be careful about the next set of tags you answer: you might be taking a quick psycho test in disguise ;) Also, I must add here that he had gathered the consent of all the participants before their personal information was used for building the statistical models.

So lets talk about the gender biases found: the women wrote 6800 words in 30 posts in a month as opposed to 3700 words in 19 posts by the men [ha-ha! I always knew that!! :D] Also, it seems that the blog is more a personal diary for women than men, although both sexes write equally --- the males seem to concentrate more on current affairs and such topics. Women are more immediate and are significantly more contextual in their writing, they use more pronouns, verbs and social and emotional words; articles are really less used by them. It was observed that men on the other hand use more articles, make judgements, talk of money with quantity and functional phrases and also swear more :)

But the more interesting facts that came to light were related to the personality stamps that stood out from the blog posts. Neurotics seemed to express more anxiety on their blogs, describing physical states, their jobs/work etc. They talked less of other humans, and more about themselves (using phrases like 'if I', 'I have to', etc.). Extraversion on the other hand was found to be more closely associated with high references to other people and low references to self. The extroverts use social words like 'cool', and less often talk about their achievements and occupation. Openness stood out in personalities through the use of long and frequent words, and the more open a person is, it was found that he/she would express more positive feelings and communicate better through the blog. Closely related to this personality trait is agreeable-ness, and again long words and articles really stood out in the writings of people who scored high on this count. Agreeable people also tend to use less contractions like "I'm, haven't", etc. and use the full forms to write out "I am" or "is not", etc. Finally, conscientiousness --- the high scorers meticulously end their posts with punctuation, where as the low scorers fiddle about from topic to topic using words like 'anyway', 'actually', etc. Interestingly, these people also talk less about their personal friends, etc. For the uninitiated, the five factors above are a standard way of mapping personalities.

Before you start jumping back to read your own blog to see what category you fit into, take a look at the good news here as well:Bloggers seem to score really high on the extraversion and openness scales in general. So if you are a blogger, the chances are that you are an open and agreeably extravert person! :)[both images from the slides of his talk]
And the fun part of this research (which aligns well with my own research interests) is that future natural language processing programs will probably be able to tie together multiple blogs and online personalities by the same person, perhaps even generate a blog post that looks sufficiently like your own! And of course there might be programs that chart out your personality profile from the blog, even recommend potential people whose blogs/personalities you might like, taking social networks and online dating to the next level. So the question you gotta ask yourself now is, "What category do I belong to?". Tell me, blogger, do you feel lucky? :D