When I was in first and second grade, I used to take the reading tests and check my grade level. I was so happy one day when I registered 8th grade. But Now Maya Frost has run this blog through something called “the blog readability test” and found that I haven’t progressed much since then. What you’re reading is at the high-school level. I think I take this as a compliment. Ever curious, I’d love to know how other blogs, like mine, rate.
January 15th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Woo-hoo, Where got a “College (Postgrad)” rating. I feel like such a sophomore.
January 15th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Richard, your blog ranks on the high-end of the intellectual scale, both in terms of content and readership. Excluding specific blogs serving and supporting specific professional organizations, I can’t think of one that would rank higher. I truly learn something new and useful here every day.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Brendan: Lower is better.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
The content is what matters, not the verbage. Hemingway & Steinbeck wrote at high school level.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
What do we have to do to up your score? Write in longer sentences? Use words like ‘meretricious’?
January 15th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Richard,
‘m still not sure why my blog would get a “genius” rating, but some have suggested that it’s because I mention Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and other universities. What’s interesting is that I’m usually criticizing these universities (cost, percentage of endowment spent on the public good, reluctance to offer online courses to the public, misguided or just plain uppity attitudes about things like global education), not discussing the latest research in depth or celebrating the power of the Ivy brand.
Another idea someone sent in was that my blog mentions Einstein, da Vinci, and some other smarty pants people.
Still, I am not sure if I should giggle or grimace about the genius badge. If all it takes to earn a genius ranking is dropping Ivy names or mentioning famous geniuses, well, that’s just depressing.
Being a genius is about being innovative, as you well know. So, perhaps I should just grin and take it as a compliment.
I find your blog FAR more eggheady than mine–and I mean that in a good way. Perhaps if you dropped a few more Ivy mentions your “rating” would jump.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Mine got a “Junior High School” rating. I guess I’ll have to be more erudite in the future.
January 15th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Mine rated Junior Highs School, too. Well, I guess I can’t ask for more, since English is really my second language!
January 15th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I would not be concerned with the “high- school level” rating. I read this blog (or any blog) for entertainment, and perhaps to learn a thing or two. As long as the grammatical structure is proper, and the information is good, i’ll stick around. If I liked pages of dry, boring texts filled with with words I have to “wikipedia” to understand, i’d read 4th year books on neuropsychology in my spare time.
January 15th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Maya, I’d guess it’s based on a measure like the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, which is based on sentence length and number of syllables per word. So name-dropping “Yale” could actually lower your score, while name-dropping the little-known “University of Ontario Institute of Technology” should raise it.
January 15th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Two things make this blog among the best out there (and I still can’t think of a better one). One, fantastic and unique content and commentary spread across myriad topics and authored by one of best minds in the world today. And, two, the readership and its participation.
There’s something I like to call “the mail-box education”; you could substitute “water-cooler education” or something like that too. What distinguishes a great law school in my view as both a recent student and present part-time professor is not the law (they all teach the same law for the most part) or the professors (they all teach the same law for the most part) but the quality of the students that bump into and interact with one another each day, debating various topics and bringing different enlightened perspectives to their various discussions; ie, TEACHING EACH OTHER. That’s why diversity is so important too, as an educational pathway, not just a fairness doctrine. On this blog, the quality of the readerships’ comments truly augments the learning and sharing experience.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
allaboutcities.ca scored “college (undergrad)”.
Can someone clarify this: I think they’re measuring what education level someone likely needs to read and understand your blog.
Therefore scoring “high school” level would mean that it is quite accessible, which has to be a good thing.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Well, I’m no clearer on how this works. I just went in and checked again and my site has been reduced to college level! Perhaps I wrote a couple of very stupid posts today.
Maybe it’s just a random result each time and they’re just toying with us!
I feel I must mention that I tried http://www.BarackObama.com and that site got a genius rating.
Whatever. I totally agree with you, Hayden–Richard’s blog is my absolute favorite and it doesn’t matter how it ranks in any sort of word-choice algorithm (ooh, fancy word there)….
Keep it coming.
January 15th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I assume it skims the posts that come up on the home page (usually 7-10 for most blogs), so if you write a few simple posts like “Joe Smith has a great essay on mice in mazes _here_” then it will lower the education level needed to understand your blog.
Out of curiosity I ran my blog’s old URL, allaboutcities.blogspot.com, and it scored “genius”. In skimming the posts there, they had more complicated titles, so maybe that’s part of it.
“Genuis” isn’t an education level, however. Hmmm…
January 15th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I’m pretty sure it just looks at the content of whatever page you give it (i.e. the front page for a blog) without following any links. It may not even read the whole page. You can get its rating for an individual post by giving it the direct link to that post.
The “Tolerance-Competitiveness Connection” post rates as genius, btw, and this has pushed this blog’s overall rating up to College (Post-Grad). Congratulations?