in so many words

I think it could be considered an axiom that the point of writing a blog is to have people actually read what you’ve written, and bloggers do many thing to attract readers to their blogs. Bloggers leave links to their blogs on web forums, send links in email, and swap links with other bloggers. And there are even websites like Technorati where bloggers can register and track the popularity of their blog, and also collect links to other blogs. I haven’t really done very much to promote my blog - it’s just hasn’t been a priority. My blog time is spent writing/creating and just haven’t had the time or the initiative to promote my blog. My wife, family and some friends have read some of my posts, and a few people have stumbled upon my blog, but I’m pretty certain that I have one of the least visited blogs on the Internet, and this was confirmed recently when I opened an account at Technorati - my blog is ranked 5,137,428 out of all the blogs they monitor. While that doesn’t really bother me, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to register my blog, and I added a Technorati button to my main page. And maybe someday I can get into the top 4,000,000.

… I’m waiting here, just waiting to hear from you

I recently discovered a web site that rates blogs on readability, or the “level of education that is required to understand your blog”. I hadn’t really thought about this before - I’ve just assumed that most everyone who has a basic command of the English language could understand what I’ve written. But now the people at Critics Rant have created a web script that analyzes web pages and determines what level of education is needed to read the analyzed web site. I don’t know what parameters they use to make their determination, but it seems to me that there are too many variables involved to accurately assign an educational grade level to the reading level a particular web site using only scripting code. So I don’t put a lot of stock in this rating, but it’s interesting to me in a technological way - someone wrote the code to search blogs (it also works on web sites), rate the type of words used, and determine a level of comparative educational understanding. Cool, but it’s really all for fun - after all, you’d think that a guy in his fifties who got A’s in college English could write better than high school level, but according to Critics Rant, that apparently not in the case… maybe if I had written more sentences like “She remained entirely pusillanimous and supercilious, yet her enticing pulchritude and luminosity were thoroughly debilitating” I would have gotten a better score.

More sagacious than pedantic