Well, this is an interesting post, and I don't know what it means, really. Your thoughts? (Be sure to check out the original in its entirety.)
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From a post by Patrick Ishmael at
The News Buckit: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.
So how much more does the Left use Carlin's "seven words" versus the Right? According to my calculations, try somewhere in the range of 18-to-1.
Yowsers.
<snip>Update @ 9:16am: Great point by reader Joe.
What? No Democratic Underground? No IndyMedia? No FreeRepublic? No Townhall? No FrontPageMag?
And thus, the numbers:
* Democratic Underground: 947,000
* IndyMedia: 206,000
* FreeRepublic: 4010
* TownHall.com (minus HH blog): 156
* FrontPageMag: 11,800
It only gets worse... 1537788-to-37285. 41-to-1. Holy mackeral.
<snip>Update @ 5:24pm: John Hinderaker from Powerlineblog says the following on his News Bloggers site:
...when I looked at the chart that set forth the results of the survey, I found that 68 instances of the "seven words" were recorded for Power Line. This struck me as obviously wrong. I'm certain that six of the seven words have never appeared on Power Line at all, and the seventh (a four-letter word that starts with "s") has appeared only a time or two when we were quoting someone else.
So I ran the search on Power Line the same way it was done for the survey. What I found was that virtually all of the references that came up were in "trackbacks." This means that the language appeared on someone else's site, not ours.
I conclude from this that the survey was pretty badly flawed. Not only did it fail to distinguish between blog entries and comments, which is at least defensible, it failed to distinguish between words used on the site in question, and words used on a different site, which is not defensible.
I certainly won't dispute that this was by no means a perfect gauge of blogospheric vulgarity; it certainly leaves much to be desired. After all, I didn't exactly devote a lot of time to developing an extensive hypothesis and method.
And although I'm sure John is right about his site, the only way that this very basic survey would really be blown (IMHO) is if the errors found therein were especially pronounced.
Powerlineblog is a nationally-recognized and very well-read blog that has at least 17,300 pages to its name. Yet factoring the errant vulgarity count, that means that only .4% of its pages had erroneously been found to have had one of the "seven words." (Technically, it sounds like the words are in fact there, but that's not because of anything the PB guys have done and really doesn't speak to the point of the survey.)
But that .4% is a teeny tiny margin of error. Compare that to Democratic Underground, who at this very moment are humorously reveling in their newfound linguistic primacy and who apparently have no doubt that the 947,000 hits attributed to them are accurate. That's not a trackback problem... Definitely take a look. It's a party in there.
<snip>Also: On the "For future debate" front, one Meebo respondent presents the following:
...I did the ratio of "7 words" to pages for Daily Kos (260,000 pages with 155,000 "7words") and the Free Republic (466,000 pages with 3840 "7 words"). I chose Free Republic since it's the foulest and I wanted to give benefit of the doubt. In any case, the ratio is even more pronounced with DailyKos at 1 profanity every 2 pages and Freep at 1 every 121 pages for a ratio of 60 to 1, Kos...
Recheck this finding, but it's certainly interesting.
http://newsbuckit.blogspot.com/2007/02/seven-words-you-can-never-say-on.html
