Google Buzz

As you probably know, Google launched the Buzz project quite recently. This is something in between blogs and twitter - you post messages that appear in a followers' roll, and those are not restricted to 140 symbols. You can also link Buzz to your blog stream or posts you share in Google Reader - they will appear there immediately.

A few scientists already took advantage of this, for instance here is the Buzz stream of the Field's medalist Terence Tao. For Russian speakers I would recommend the Igor Ivanov one.

If you use Buzz or know anyone from the scientific community who does, drop a comment about it. )

Take care,

Misha

Nice post about spam

Tom Martin sent me a link to his post about spam.

I always get lots of spam-like comments with no links to any porn, or warez, or anything else. Just "It was very interesting for me to read this blog post...", and so on. At some point I just gave up on erasing those – who cares about spam with no spam content? But after having a look at Tom's post I understand that I should...

The Gunning-Fog index

Nature publishing group has a science blogroll with a bit of statistics for each blog, here is how it looks like for mine:

• Ranked 18 in science (377 overall)
• 2 post(s) per week (on average)
• 65 post(s) collected so far
• 7,032 words per post (on average)
• 14% complex words (on average)
• Readability by Flesch-Kincaid : best understood by university graduates
• Readability by Gunning-Fog : 146.0
• On 0 blogroll(s)
• 2 links to other science blogs
• 0 links from other science blogs

The first thing that crossed my mind was "what the hell this Gunning-Fog index is?". If you follow the link you get that "The Gunning-Fog index [...] is a rough estimate of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to understand the text on a first reading."

So, basically an average person needs to study for 146 years to get a rough idea what I'm writing about, while a well understandable text should have the index below 12. First I thought that this is due to appalling English I'm used to, but if you read further you'll see that there is nothing to do with that. The Gunning-Fox index comes from analysis of the average sentence length and the average number of syllables in words.

I never thought those indexes even exist. I promise, I promise to keep sentences shorter... )

Take care,

Misha

Bloggers given new Ten Commandments by church leaders

Christian bloggers have been given a new set of 'Ten Commandments' aimed at delivering them from the temptations of online arguments. Here it is:

1) You shall not put your blog before your integrity.
2) You shall not make an idol of your blog.
3) You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.
4) Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.
5) Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.
6) You shall not murder someone else's honour, reputation or feelings.
7) You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.
8) You shall not steal another person's content.
9) You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.
10) You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content.