Profanity and Blogging

[MODU]

I stumbled across this article this morning and thought it was interesting.  Being one that finds it challenging not to slip into a bleeping tirade from time to time, I can understand the authors interest in this subject.

"Seven words you can never say on television"... but which are said on the Internet. A lot.

The Net's not always a kid-friendly place; there is plenty of foul language out there. And of course, the blogosphere is no different.

But how different are the Rightosphere and Leftosphere when it comes to "dirty" language? Which side produces the most profanity-laced diatribes? Via Instapundit, I happened upon this interesting challenge from InstaPunk:

"I propose an exercise to be performed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out. The exercise is this: Search six months' worth of content, posts and comments, of the 20 most popular blogs on the right and the left. The search criteria are George Carlin's infamous '7 Dirty Words.' [Click this link for the list of expletives.]"

And this is what I found, using what I deemed -- through a mix of TTLB and 2006's Weblog Award lists -- to be the 18 biggest Lefty blogs, and 22 biggest Righty blogs. I couldn't account for the 6-month time period, and I even gave the Lefty blogs a 4 blog advantage. But it didn't make much of a difference.

(Cont...)

[Gabu]

Beyond what has already been mentioned by people commenting on this "study", the biggest problem I can see here is that he doesn't seem to be accounting for the size of the blogs at all.  DailyKos, for example, has a huge member base, and every entry gets hundreds of comments from readers.  It seems to me that a much more scientific way of doing it would be to calculate a "profanity per capita" measure, because what his study may show more than anything else is the fact that there are a lot more people frequenting left-wing blogs than right-wing blogs.

[MODU]

Beyond what has already been mentioned by people commenting on this "study", the biggest problem I can see here is that he doesn't seem to be accounting for the size of the blogs at all.  DailyKos, for example, has a huge member base, and every entry gets hundreds of comments from readers.  It seems to me that a much more scientific way of doing it would be to calculate a "profanity per capita" measure, because what his study may show more than anything else is the fact that there are a lot more people frequenting left-wing blogs than right-wing blogs.

That could be a good exercise.  Since I don't visit most of the sites he has listed, I have no idea how many people there are using those sites.  You should recommend the author to try it out and see how it changes the figures.