A couple days ago, we blogged about Tom Coates's celebration of five years of blogging: he put all 1.1 million years worth of posts from his blog, Plasticbag.org, online as a giant text file and asked his readers to do cool crap with it.
Cool crap they hath wrought: Tom rounds up the tasty visualisations of his posting frequency, verbal tics, and the way that switching from Blogger to Movable Type changed his posting style in a long post today. How cool.
Our first batch of analysis comes from Cal Henderson who has basically used the data at his disposal to take the piss out of me. A few weeks ago I got a bit moody with Matt Jones after he complained that I was starting every post I was writing with the word "So…" (here's the grump in question). So what has Cal done? He's established the horrible truth of the situation – here's a graph of how many posts I've started with the word "So" over time… As you can see – a startling indictment and as Cal said to me on AIM, "evidence that you're getting worse".
