Verbal drag
[It's not just NaNoWriMo this month, it's also NaBloPoMo. While I suspect I won't manage to post something here every day, I do feel the urge to stretch my writing muscles a bit. Amazing what a bit of peer pressure can do. So here's a quick post, part of my effort to write more.]
I just came across the GenderAnalyzer, a site that, when given the URL of any blog, will predict the gender of the blog author. (I'm not sure how it would react to multi-author blogs. Must experiment.) According to the GenderAnalyzer's front page, the analysis is done by "a text
classifier hosted over at uClassify.com
… trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women." I promptly plugged in this blog's URL, and got the reply "We think http://householdopera.typepad.com/ is written by a man." I've got two X chromosomes that say otherwise!
There's also a poll on the site asking users about the accuracy of the results. So far, of the 2500 or so people who've replied, about 56% say it was correct. So it's slightly better than flipping a coin, but not by much. Then again, the Gender Genie told me the same thing about my blog, and I once took the Spark Gender Test and was told I'm "definitely a man." Apparently, I'm in drag on the interwebs without even trying, which, for me, is a pleasing thought. (Can you tell I also score in the "Gender Outlaw" range on Kate Bornstein's Gender Aptitude Test?)
Fellow bloggers, care to comment on your results?
It picked me for a man. Go figger. I always thought I wrote like a girl.