Blog Readability Level Test

[jingofever]

Here. Kind of interesting, though pointless. According to that site, you need to be a college postgrad to understand the Rigorous Intuition blog. Freerepublic gets a junior high level. Democratic Underground gets college postgrad. You cannot check the levels of our posts.

[Jeff]

That's pretty neat.

I checked the board by pasting in www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/index.php

Reading level is "genius"

[philipacentaur]

That's pretty neat.

I checked the board by pasting in www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/index.php

Reading level is "genius"

Yeah, but prisonplanet.com gets the same rating, so...

[Jeff]

Yeah, but prisonplanet.com gets the same rating, so...

Hey, Einstein

[theeKultleeder]

This is old word processor technology. I forget which one, but if you typed in strings of big words incoherently you could get a "genius" rating.

[philipacentaur]

Yeah, but prisonplanet.com gets the same rating, so...

Hey, Einstein

Hahaha! I was just thinking about that sketch yesterday. I think that's the second time you've made a KITH reference that had already been on my mind. That's not saying much though, since I'm always thinking about KITH sketches.

Do you think "Conspiracy Theory" is more like Professional Wrestling, or Shirling?

[jingofever]

This is old word processor technology. I forget which one, but if you typed in strings of big words incoherently you could get a "genius" rating.

The Flesch-Kincaid? It's packaged differently. That is what matters.

[Cosmic Cowbell]

...they don't take Blog comments into account.....Jeff's are just about unreadable at this point. A shame really....

~C

[elfismiles]

Apparently this "test" is a scam marketing scheme.

Oh, and note the allusion to a "faked death" at the top of the article - shades of Theremy.

sMiles

-=-=-

Exposed: another fiendish way to make money on the web
Charles Arthur Guardian Unlimited, Friday December 7 2007 It is important to remember how important scepticism is. The woman who exposed John Darwin and his wife was fuelled by a suitable dose of I-don't-believe-it. She found the picture of Darwin and his wife Anne in Panama simply by entering the words "John Anne Panama" into Google. John Darwin was certainly not dead, even if his life insurance had been claimed.

I'd like to think I'm following the same pole star in this story, which is about credulous bloggers and subtle uses of the web for making money.

It starts like this. Let's say you're a site offering cash advances - better known as loans. You want to be on the top of Google's results when someone searches for "cash advance". How do you do it? Easy. Get bloggers to point to your site. For free. Bloggers have too much self-esteem, you cry - they'd never push a loans site up the rankings. They're too canny, too cynical.

Wrong. Bloggers today offer a great resource for the clever to exploit. If you're a loans site looking to boost your ranking, you can probably do it for about the cost of drawing up a few graphics in an afternoon and seeding a suitably influential blog. Pretty soon you'll have hundreds of people copying it.

Being pointed at by influential people

If the graphics have a sneaky connection to your "cash advance" site - say, the "ALT" tag and text (which is displayed if the image isn't, and is always read by search engines) - then if lots of bloggers use your images, and your HTML with the ALT tag, you'll be pointed to by influential people, and Google and probably other search engines will rank you number one. Result!

And what's better, if your original graphics vanish, all that's left is the ALT tag and the link to your site, and by then most of the bloggers will have forgotten about it anyway. Long-term result!

And so we come to the story of the Blog Readability Test, which appeared - apparently out of the blue - one day on a page within the criticsrant site. Criticsrant calls itself a "multi-author blog" dedicated to offering opinions about films and TV.

There's no link I can find from the main pages of the site to the "Blog Readability" test (a search on the phrase turns up zero results; Google concurs, finding only the page itself).

Yet on November 2, Wired's Underwire blog had a post triumphantly noting how New Scientist and the Huffington Post - and the Underwire blog itself - were "not as smart as we thought". That post is the first citation I can find via Technorati linking to the "Blog Readability Test" URL - http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx. And of course, Wired is a pretty high-influence blog. Post something there and quite a few people will pick it up.

Sonia Zjawinski, who wrote the post, tells me that while she usually aims to credit the sources of her posts, "I actually have no clue where I found this. It was just one of those dumb things you come across when skimming blogs and websites."


The chart (above) shows Technorati's count of posts in English that contain "blog readability" per day for the last 60 days up to December 6. See how the phrase abruptly leaps around the start of November, just after that Wired post? Presently, there are 685 results. Remember that number. We'll use it later.

Obscure directory name

Odd thing about that URL for the test: the directory. "bb" is such a... well, out of the way name for a directory. It's the sort of thing you'd use if you, I dunno, had hacked a site and were adding directories almost at random. Looking at the source of the page, it uses its own CSS file - not the main site's. (The Google Analytics tracking account used - UA-1932440-1 - matches the main site's, though it's quite easy to copy that text from any page.)

Anyway, once you've input your blog's URL, you'll quickly get a graphic showing your blog's "readability" by school age - elementary school, high school, undergraduate, postgraduate, genius and so on. It seems to happen really fast, given the sort of linguistic analysis that must be needed, but computers are fast these days, aren't they?

Then you have an image, which you can - if you've got the time and energy - copy, upload to your blog, and display; or a bit of HTML, which is much simpler, to paste in your page or profile. No muss, no fuss.

I was looking at this when I started wondering about the HTML. It has an image link - img style="border: none;" src="http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/readinglevel/img/junior_high.jpg". All well and good. But then there's the ALT tag - remember, the stuff that search engines actually index: alt="cash advance" Get a Cash Advance".

And that phrase "cash advance" has a link to an entirely different site, called cashadvance1500.com.

Now, what happens when happy bloggers - or MySpacers, or Facebookers, or whatever, laughing over their blog's or profile's readability or lack of it, paste the code on their site? Search engines index their site and find a link from them pointing to "cash advance" and that site. Well, that sounds like a recommendation for the site, the search engines decide.

Top of the rankings

The result? When you do a Google search for "cash advance", lo and behold, there at the top of the "natural" results is cashadvance1500.com.

Since it's a site which only has 77 "normal" sites pointing towards it, coming top of that search seems quite a result. Until, of course, you remember the 685-odd blogs linking to it via their ALT tags.

There are some questions I'd still like to know the answer to:
- How was the Underwire blog told about the Blog Readability test? I've asked the writer and editor. They haven't replied to my email early Thursday.
- Do the people who run Critics Rant have any connection with the Blog Readability test? Do they even know it's there? I emailed them on Wednesday; they haven't replied.
- Does cashadvance1500 have a commercial or other connection with the people who devised the Blog Readability test? They haven't replied to my email.
- Is Critics Rant getting paid for the bandwidth that the Readability test is using? Again, no reply.

The thing is, I can only come up with a couple of scenarios for how this has happened. One: the cashadvance1500 people have paid Critics Rant to put the page up. Two: someone acting for cashadvance1500 hacked the Critics Rant site and put the page up. Or, just possibly, to allow for complete scepticism about everyone's motives, someone hacked the Critics Rant site and put up the links in the hope it would reflect badly on the loan people. (Didn't really succeed, did it?) Or, finally, Critics Rant put the page up spontaneously with the links, intentionally not linking to it themselves, to promote the loan people. (Not so impossible: traceroute suggests both sites have the same host.)

It's a twisted world, the net. Perhaps John Darwin did get to London and lost his memory - which is why he walked into the police station. But when you're trying to figure out motives, it's usually a good idea to follow the money. Even if it's only the promise of loaning you some in the future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... eadability

[brownzeroed]

Looks about on target.

Theremy? Highschool.
Fox News? Highschool.
Huffington Post? Junior High.
Dreamsend? Elementary School.
Folks who believe Theresa Duncan didn't exist? Home schooled...

[elfismiles]

Looks about on target.

Theremy? Highschool.
Fox News? Highschool.
Huffington Post? Junior High.
Dreamsend? Elementary School.
Folks who believe Theresa Duncan didn't exist? Home schooled...

Howdy BZ,

I think folks who make declarations such as yours tend to be pretty much "Elementary School." But then I'd be stooping to that level by saying so ... oops.

I'm not among that handful who think TD didn't exist.

And Home Schoolers often do better than public schooled students.

I was simply following up on a post I remembered reading here that I found out was a probable scam. ... and which coincidentally makes a reference to someone who faked their own death. That does happen.

peace

smiles

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

Apparently this "test" is a scam marketing scheme.

Oh, and note the allusion to a "faked death" at the top of the article - shades of Theremy.

sMiles

-=-=-

Exposed: another fiendish way to make money on the web
Charles Arthur Guardian Unlimited, Friday December 7 2007 It is important to remember how important scepticism is. The woman who exposed John Darwin and his wife was fuelled by a suitable dose of I-don't-believe-it. She found the picture of Darwin and his wife Anne in Panama simply by entering the words "John Anne Panama" into Google. John Darwin was certainly not dead, even if his life insurance had been claimed.

I'd like to think I'm following the same pole star in this story, which is about credulous bloggers and subtle uses of the web for making money.
....

It starts like this. Let's say you're a site offering cash advances - better known as loans. You want to be on the top of Google's results when someone searches for "cash advance". How do you do it? Easy. Get bloggers to point to your site. For free. Bloggers have too much self-esteem, you cry - they'd never push a loans site up the rankings. They're too canny, too cynical.

Wrong. Bloggers today offer a great resource for the clever to exploit. If you're a loans site looking to boost your ranking, you can probably do it for about the cost of drawing up a few graphics in an afternoon and seeding a suitably influential blog. Pretty soon you'll have hundreds of people copying it.

Being pointed at by influential people

If the graphics have a sneaky connection to your "cash advance" site - say, the "ALT" tag and text (which is displayed if the image isn't, and is always read by search engines) - then if lots of bloggers use your images, and your HTML with the ALT tag, you'll be pointed to by influential people, and Google and probably other search engines will rank you number one. Result!



It's a twisted world, the net. Perhaps John Darwin did get to London and lost his memory - which is why he walked into the police station. But when you're trying to figure out motives, it's usually a good idea to follow the money. Even if it's only the promise of loaning you some in the future.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... eadability

And I'm crazy (or a disruptor according to Jeff) for pointing out similiar shenanigans in media psy-ops.

[Jeff]

And I'm crazy (or a disruptor according to Jeff) for pointing out similiar shenanigans in media psy-ops.

No. After your latest example I believe you must be either mentally ill or a disruptor. I haven't decided which.

[brownzeroed]

Elf:

Oh, and note the allusion to a "faked death" at the top of the article - shades of Theremy.

sMiles

Well, it does seem like an obsession. Have you posted about anything else?

And if I remember correctly, you did give it a bit of air time.

Stay squirrelly,

BZ

[populistindependent]

Yep. Flatter us by telling us we are smarter and better and we will follow the rulers anywhere.

We are smarter - that is, we have degrees.

We are physically healthier - that is, we make the "right choices."

We are mentally healthier - that is, we believe in the cult of psychology.

We are winners - that is, we make more money and make clever financial decisions.

We are spiritually better - that is, we are "open to" any sort of mumbo jumbo and committed to none.

We are socially a cut above - that is, we don't need anyone and are well-adjusted to society.

We are culturally superior - we have better taste in fashion and make better consumer choices.

We are politically better - that is, we can "see" outside of "the matrix."

We are practically fucking perfect.