{"id":1792,"date":"2008-11-08T10:17:42","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T14:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=1792"},"modified":"2008-11-08T17:48:36","modified_gmt":"2008-11-08T21:48:36","slug":"surprising-but-welcome-but-surprising-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/surprising-but-welcome-but-surprising-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Surprising (But Welcome) (But SURPRISING) News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oneplusyou.com\/q\/v\/blog_verbosity\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: .5em; padding: .5em; border: 1px solid silver;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.oneplusyou.com\/q\/img\/badges\/blog_verbosity_81_percent_shorter.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Do you talk too much in your blog?\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn&#8217;t that be &#8220;the average blogger<em><span style=\"color: maroon;\"><strong>&#8216;s<\/strong><\/span><\/em>&#8220;? Does &#8220;81% shorter than&#8221; mean &#8220;81% as long as&#8221; or does it mean &#8220;19% as long as&#8221;? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his\/her posts)? Surely it can&#8217;t mean &#8220;&#8230;as compared to <em>the entire universe<\/em> of blogs&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>Still, the word &#8220;shorter&#8221; is inarguably seductive. (In this context, anyhow.)<\/p>\n<p>And then of course, for you anarchists out there, it&#8217;s easy enough to manipulate the results, just by goofing around with the underlying HTML:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oneplusyou.com\/q\/v\/blog_verbosity\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: .5em; padding: .5em; border: 1px solid silver;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.oneplusyou.com\/q\/img\/badges\/blog_verbosity_100_percent_shorter.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"Do you talk too much in your blog?\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Reassuring, though. Even if it IS a fantasy.<\/p>\n<p>(Click the image to check your own blog posts&#8217;, er, stature.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> Be sure to read Kate Lord Brown&#8217;s <a title=\"Kate Lord Brown panics\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/surprising-but-welcome-but-surprising-news\/#comment-1185\">comment<\/a>, below &#8212; and my reply &#8212; to understand why you almost certainly should not panic about this. I&#8217;m pretty sure the results, well, verge on the bogus. Misleading, let&#8217;s say.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, okay. We could quibble with the wording. Shouldn&#8217;t that be &#8220;the average blogger&#8216;s&#8220;? Does &#8220;81% shorter than&#8221; mean &#8220;81% as long as&#8221; or does it mean &#8220;19% as long as&#8221;? And who knows how accurate this is, or how they calculate the average length of a blogger (or his\/her posts)? Surely it can&#8217;t mean [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,37,19,20,50],"tags":[687,688,689],"class_list":{"0":"post-1792","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","7":"category-onlineworld","8":"category-internet","9":"category-programmingetc","10":"category-language-writing_cat","11":"tag-blog-lies","12":"tag-blog-damned-lies","13":"tag-blog-statistics","14":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-sU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1792"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1824,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1792\/revisions\/1824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}