Readability - just how smart are you.

My friend, Ian Macey, has an interesting comment about 'blog readability'. This is something that I had not previously heard about or thought about. He came across a link, via John Naughton's blog, that referred to a website that will assess a blog in term of the level of education required by the reader (not the level of education required by the writer).

Intrigued by this idea, and wondering just how I measure up, I thought I'd give this a go. According to 'The Blog Readability Test' the required education level for my blog is "High School". Slightly disheartened by this (Ian's, by the way, is "Genius") I thought I would try this on a few other blogs.

So the first that I picked was the blog of Joel Spolsky . Joel is a very regular blog writer and book author, and is a key thinker and doer with the IT industry. His blog comes out as "Junior High School".

Okay - what about some politicians: Well, how about David Cameron - "Junior High School", Gordon Brown comes out as "Genius Level". Interesting.

I'll try one more: Boris Johnson - couldn't compute this one - Alright, only joking - his comes out as "College - Undergrad".

So what does all this mean? Well, probably not very much because we don't how the 'Readability Test' works. Is it looking at the structure of sentences, is it looking at the length of words (longer words score higher?), is it looking at the number of external references. The thing is, we don't know but it is a bit of fun - and it does make you think about what, and how, you write.

One thing that it has revealed to me is that many of the people that you think would have blogs, in fact don't have blogs - perhaps they are just too busy doing the things that make them (in)famous to actually have the time. Perhaps it is still a geeky thing to do (and that would certainly explain the high proportion of IT related blogs).

So thanks Ian, for putting that on your blog - I'm just off to check my readability score know that its got this one to do as well!

Here is the rating for this blog: