Post Number 100

This is the 100th post on this blog (Woohoo!). I started this blog about 3 years ago, but didn’t begin writing seriously until the past year. My track record of continuing things is really bad so it’s surprising that I’ve gotten this far. Not many people read my rantings (I think I only have two readers at most), but I continue and will continue. Blog writing is therapeutic. Everyone should try it at some point, even though it feels a little like talking into the darkness at times.

It’s pretty mindblowing to read the earlier posts, where I was completely illiterate, to now, where I’m just barely literate. The past couple of years have been really good to me, and I’m thankful. I’m also thankful to anyone who reads this blog. According to my stats, somebody looks at this thing. Whoever you are, I hope that you get something out of my nonsense. Hopefully, I’ll make it to 200.

To celebrate my 100th post, I put then entire blog through some online text mining apps. Specifically, I used HyperPo and found out that I’ve typed 53,470 words, 7,189 of which are unique. While it’s astounding to me that I know 7,189 words, the average word length is only 4.7 letters long. My longest was 43 letters. I’ve written 3091 sentences on this blog, making the blog more than 168 single spaced pages long. If I’d been writing a dissertation, I’d be done with school.

Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count takes a more sophisticated approach. It claims that nearly one fourth of the words I use on this blog are more than 6 letters or “big words.” Only 2% of what I say on this blog express positive emotions, apparently. Supposedly, it can tell the difference between formal and personal writing. It’s interesting that big words make up a larger percentage of my formal writing, and social words, less. I’m not really sure what to make of this. Is 2% low? Does this mean I’m a less than positive guy? I don’t know.

Details of Writer: 41 year old Male
Date/Time: 28 November 2010, 7:26 pm
LIWC dimension Your data Personal texts Formal texts
Self-references (I, me, my) 2.23 11.4 4.2
Social words 5.89 9.5 8.0
Positive emotions 2.10 2.7 2.6
Negative emotions 1.73 2.6 1.6
Overall cognitive words 4.81 7.8 5.4
Articles (a, an, the) 8.48 5.0 7.2
Big words (> 6 letters) 23.42 13.1 19.6

Finally, I made some cool pictures with the Many Eyes app. Not being familiar with text analysis at all, I’m not sure how the algorithm works, but I get some cool pictures regardless. The picture below is a visualization of the network of words that are concurrent to one another. If you click on the link, it takes you to a page where you can zoom in on the graphic and even do your own textual analysis on this blog.