Back in July and about 111 entries ago, I put up this post based on an observation from Dave. Last week following my 777th post, Dave mused again that “The devil knows many ways to fool mere mortals…”
Is there meaning to all these numbers? One may never know…but it does get me thinking about the number of blog entries here. I wonder what a graph of my blogging would look like if I were to plot the number of entries by month on the Y axis and the time on the X axis. Or I could do an incremental graph to show the increase in entries to date. I wonder how accurate such a chart would be in predicting future growth of this blog’s volume. Of course, that doesn’t take into account that some entries are really short and others are really long. So perhaps a better method would be to calculate and graph the number of words I’ve written to date, showing variations in number of words with and without non-original text that I’ve quoted from other sources. Now that’s a daunting prospect. And probably a manual process. Any programmers or mathematicians out there want to take a stab at writing a program or formula that would do this? I suppose the easiest way would be simply to export all my entries to date, copy into Word, and do a word count. As you may notice, each entry on my home page does display a word count. The other thing to factor in is that not all of my entries are published on the site. That is, I have a number of entries in draft mode (for one reason or another) that don’t appear publicly on my site. I wonder if those entries would be factored into an export.
The other problem with the MT export for purposes of word count is that it includes for each post metadata, HTML tags, and the like. So keeping that in mind, I went ahead with an export and copy ‘n paste into Word.
Here are my current blog stats:
Published Entries: 782 (including this one)
Total Entries: 811
Comments: 637
Exported Pages in a Word Doc: 902 (Courier New size 10 font)
Words: 226, 585
Characters (no spaces): 1,396,051
Characters (with spaces): 1,599,735
Paragraphs: 26,179
Lines: 51,254
Word Doc File Size: 3,859 kb
See what you’ve done, Dave? Now you have me analyzing the text of my blog so much I’ll have its physical representation mapped out in 3D before long.
Of course, that leads to more philosophical discussions about words and text. Do words exist outside text and speech? What is their physical existence? What does text look like in its physical form? Is it possible to create a real-world model of a word based on characteristics such as sound or shape of letter or intonation? But we’ll save that discussion for another day.
