Talk about potty-mouths.
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. (Not counting this one. :)) 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.
How did I get this result? I searched Google using the following format and recorded the page results that were returned:
site:xyz.com “search term 1” OR “search term 2” OR “search term 3″… et al.
Nine search terms total — the seven profanities as single words, and two of those as their own two-word variations. I then added the individual site results together and compared them. The results are below.
< ?xml:namespace prefix = o />
Of course… is anyone surprised? Barring some mass programming shenanigans on the part of Right blogospheric bloggers, this pretty well fits, and goes beyond, the predictions most of us would have made.
Feel free to replicate the experiment and send your results, or if you have a refinement to the method or blog lists, send those, too. We’re always willing to add to the profanity data bank.
And of course, this isn’t scientific. But hey, it’s pretty @*%#$&! close.
(Cross-posted at The News Buckit. Many thanks to Jim for letting me fill in!)
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.
Update @ 1:42pm: Lest there be any confusion, I just want to make sure that if you are disagreeing with this post (and even you’re not), you’re not conversing with Jim, but with Guest-blogger Pat (hence, the cross-post); I’ve noticed some guff being directed at the big GP, and I just want to make sure you know who you’re disagreeing with.
Grazie!
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