Apparently, around 0.7% of the pages on our website contain cussing. This is 93% less than other websites who took this test. The speed at which this evaluation was completed, however, makes me wonder how they were able to cover the 1000-plus articles and 1000-plus comments in the site without having spidered them first. But it seems right, dammit.
OnePlusYou’s “Cuss-o-Meter“
According to OnePlusYou, the analysis involves two counts. The first is to count the total number of pages. The second is to count the number of those pages containing cuss words to derive a percentage. “It’s also rather interesting to measure how often people cuss on the web,” writes OnePlusYou in the description. The average cuss level of all websites having taken the cuss-o-meter test is about 10%.
My confidence dropped, however, when I did some more tests. My pal Ray Angel just wrote in his blog Geekably about frustrations hooking his iPhone to his computer, a post entitled, “Damn It.” Still, he got a clean bill of health from the cuss-o-meter with 0% of his pages containing cuss words … even when I submitted the direct link to that site, with swearing in the URL.
I also tried another one of OnePlusYou’s blog analysis widgets—The Blog Verbosity Test:
My own analysis involved scanning the database supporting BlogSchmog. I counted characters from 1047 published posts and pages, dividing that number by the average English word length of 5.10. That gave an estimate of some 581 words per post. Even given the inherent inaccuracy of that method, it is way off from the 61 word average OnePlusYou claims for our blog writing. In fact, the new word count included with the latest WordPress calculates the count on the fly and tells me this post is already up to 264 words.
OnePlusYou is a free online dating service run by “a couple of guys from San Francisco” but it may be better known for its blog widgets and quizzes involving surviving a zombie apocalypse and tallying how many people died on the day you were born (129,096 for me). In addition to the cuss-o-meter, you can rate your blog like a movie (we are rated “G”) or select from a bunch of blog stickers.
