Vanity of vanities

I recently happened upon this website which purports to assess the complexity of language used on your blog or website by reference to the 'reading level' supposedly required at various stages of the American education system. It's an amusing way to waste a few minutes putting all of your favourite sites to the test, but I wonder how reliable it is.

OK, I confess I am rather peeved to discover that the 'reading levels' of Froogville and Barstool Blues are supposedly only:

At first, I took some consolation that most of the blogs I enjoy also received this rating. Even the formidably erudite Leah was assessed at the same humble level; but today I find that she has somehow bumped herself up to a College (Post-graduate) rating. I am quite mystified. Mystified, and jealous. Yes, her sudden upgrading is particularly baffling, since of late she has only posted funny pictures and video clips; the writing has been scant and frivolous. What has she done to so impress this mysterious prose-sampling computer program?

Jeremiah, who is most of the time writing quite earnestly about Chinese history with a level of detail (footnotes and all!) and language pitched well above the average Freshman, is still rated only as Undergraduate. It really is hard to surmise the criteria on which these automated assessments may be made.

While I was briefly heartened to see that the execrable China Dirt blog was rated at only an Elementary School reading level (a dismal collection of "dating disaster" stories from expat women, it was widely known in my circle as Whiny Bitches Dotcom; it gained quite a lot of attention when it was first launched a year or so ago, but has now mercifully withered into disuse - but, if any of you thought I gave expat women an unduly hard time in my Dating in Beijing series of posts over on The Barstool a while back, you could check out some of the posts on here to see just how bitter, warped, and self-defeating some of them become), I was soon once more perplexed to discover that the hyper-literate family blog Peer-See was accorded the same disdainful rating.

But the most astounding aberration of all from this rating system is that my old friend 'Keith Tolstoy' and his oddball potpourri of Internet beachcombings is the only site I can find to be rated as:

I tipped him off about this, and he has proudly bragged of the accolade and added it to his sidebar. Now, 'Tolstoy', dear mad 'Tolstoy', is indeed a gargantuan intellect - but there's little in his blog to reveal this: it is almost devoid of text. The mystery deepens.

I begin to suspect that this so-called Readability Test is largely or wholly based on the ratio of hotlinks (and/or embedded videos) to text..... which would actually make it a very poor measure of 'readability'. I imagine there might also be some sort of weighting for the kind of sites you link to (after all, I include a pretty high proportion of links myself, but mostly to other posts of my own, or to other blogs; whereas 'Tolstoy' links to a lot of highbrow newspapers), but it seems odd, inappropriate to gauge a site's 'readability' by reference to things outside the site itself.

I did ponder conducting a series of experiments to see if I could bump up my rating (more hotlinks, numbered footnotes, bibliographies, using words like 'esoteric' and 'eclectic' and 'effulgent' more often?), but...... really, what is the point? Most of the things that ought to count towards a higher 'reading level' - long sentences and paragraphs, correct grammar/punctuation/spelling, low use of slang and profanity, high use of Latin- or Greek-derived vocabulary, extended quotations, quotations in other languages, poetry - I can already claim, and it hasn't done me any good.

I'm not really bitter, honestly. I'm just a little irritated that it's such a ridiculously bogus test.