Getting Dugg: An exercise in audience understanding

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This past weekend I finished putting together my "programmers" version of the Myers-Briggs MPTI test for online consumption. Actually, the "Real" MPTI can only be administered by a licensed practitioner and it's trademarked. However, over the years, Keirsey and a number of others have refined their own well-researched versions of this test, and those are not trademarked.

Consequently, with a little study, and common sense on figuring out how the test is actually scored, it is possible to put together a highly accurate version of the MPTI. So I posted this, along with a nice chart that links to the Wikipedia page for each of the 16 personality types, as well as 16 details pages with data accumulated from a number of sources, over on eggheadcafe.com on Sunday afternoon.

I also submitted it to Digg, mostly because I had a "hunch" that it would fit pretty well with the Digg geek herd mentality.

Well! Within 5 minutes, it already had 10 Diggs, and as of this morning (Monday) it had some 1400 Diggs and had made the front page, and had some 300 comments, most of which were favorable. I've never gotten any of my "Stuff" dugg more than six or seven times, so this was an epiphany of sorts.

They say its the title. Of course "10 Best ways...", "Amazing ..." and similar buzz phrases can get you dugg, but it really takes the herd mentality to make it to the Digg front page (and if you do, you better have your webserver and your pages running lean and mean, or you won't be there long).

My catchy title starts with "Are you a programmer?", and it was posted to the Programming section. I guess that combination of title and the natural curiosity of being able to take a free personality test online must have hit the right "DiggNerve".


Anyway, Analytics reported some 27,000 page views just for Sunday - a day when most people are watching football, and they certainly aren't at work.

On Monday, Dec 11, the "article page" had garnered 55,687 page views for the day and was responsible for approximately 56 percent of the site-wide Adsense revenue for Monday - all from the single 300X250 ad that appears at the top of the article. But the residual effect should be good as well, since many of the visitors were brand new and will come back repeatedly to visit our site for more good content. The only real downside is that the ISP bitched about the extra bandwidth!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9:20 AM

    good work, peter

    i've long been a fan of the mbti

    i was first exposed to it when i was about sixteen years old and was deeply interested in psychology from that point on

    btw, that first test told me i was an intj, and as i've taken the test over the years, i keep coming up as an intj - am i firmly planted or just stagnant? :^)

    thanks for the article on egghead - i enjoyed it

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg5:18 PM

    I looked at some of the comments on the Digg news page for this, and there were a "Lot" of INTJ people - I am too. Welcome to the club, Mr. "Mastermind".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kevin11:25 AM

    I took the test, I am a programmer, the test suggested I become a musician. Funny, I love to play guitar...

    ReplyDelete
  4. peterbromberg12:00 PM

    I once wrote a piece that mentioned how common it is for programmers to also be musicians. I am an ex bass and flute jazzman, having played clubs in NY and NJ prior to moving to FL and taking on a new life as a "programmer".

    ReplyDelete

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