Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn’t that be “the average blogger‘s“? Does “81% shorter than” mean “81% as long as” or does it mean “19% as long as”? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his/her posts)? Surely it can’t mean “…as compared to the entire universe of blogs”?
Still, the word “shorter” is inarguably seductive. (In this context, anyhow.)
And then of course, for you anarchists out there, it’s easy enough to manipulate the results, just by goofing around with the underlying HTML:
Reassuring, though. Even if it IS a fantasy.
(Click the image to check your own blog posts’, er, stature.)
Update: Be sure to read Kate Lord Brown’s comment, below — and my reply — to understand why you almost certainly should not panic about this. I’m pretty sure the results, well, verge on the bogus. Misleading, let’s say.
83% shorter! Now what?
Marta: “Now what?” she says. Well, one good thing is that during the NaNo month, and with your energies (Lord knows) focused elsewhere too, by the 30th of them month your average will probably have dropped even further!
Hi John – could do with some HTML anarchy … WKDN is 292% *longer* than ave – post ave 1678 words. OMG why did no one say anything … unless it counts html (in other words all the video links etc as well as The Words …) I promise to be more … concise in future :(
Kate: Ha! That’s actually pretty funny (well, sitting here it is). One of the reasons I have come to like skulking about on your blog is that the chatty, longish posts are a comfortable fit for me — I’d HATE for you to become self-conscious about the length.
In truth, I didn’t even notice the “average length” information above the “my posts are X% shorter/longer” image. Going back and re-running it just now, I find that it says my average blog post is around 79 words long.
Which is, umm, how you say…? Yes, that’s the word: bullsh!t.
What it tells me is that this thing is counting the length not of entire blog posts, but of the portion of blog posts which appear in the blog’s feed. I can’t remember for sure, but there’s some way in Blogger to specify that the feed show the entire post, or just the first N words. (Something like that.) I bet if you changed it to (say) 100 words or so, it will change the Blog Verbosity results as well.
All of which is sorta interesting but the primary takeaway is: do NOT change the way you’ve been blogging! :)
Ha! Thanks John. Well – I tried another one of these widgets on someone’s blog the other day to rank the ‘genius’ level of the site (always a mistake) and came out as ‘sub-high school’! Something’s maybe getting ‘Lost in Translation’ but normal service will be resumed once I reappear from the Spanish Civil War ..!