Gender-me?

No idea how this website works, but it analyzes blogs and attempts to determine whether they are written by a man or a woman by somehow comparing the writing to a control-group of male and female authored blogs.

So I decided to give the ol' Frying Pan a look-see. The result?

"We guess http://das-frog.blogspot.com is written by a woman (58%), however it's quite gender neutral."

Nice, I rather like being gender-neutral.

Hmmm... I wonder what it has to say about the girliest blog I read?

"We think http://winnipegprincess.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (64%)."

Wow, okay, that was not what I was expecting... Either Princess of the Universe is keeping something from us, or their algorithm could use a little tweaking. I'm guessing it's the latter.

Okay, how about a blog actually written by a man?

"We have strong indicators that http://redactedblog.blogspot.com is written by a man (94%)."

Dan will be relieved.

Peter, on the other hand, appears to be in trouble.

"We guess http://peterdewolf.wordpress.com is written by a woman (56%), however it's quite gender neutral."

[Pause while Froggy feeds address after address into the machine, looking for a solidly female response to mirror the 94% male given to Dan]

I am perplexed. The highest certainty of female authorship I could encounter from my blog roll was Molly, coming in at 71%, followed closely by Deutlich at 68%.

But many of my other bloggy ladies showed up with startlingly high percentage certainty of being male... so either there's a whole lot of fakery going on out there, or this algorithm is decidedly warped.

I'm guessing it's the algorithm, as I've met Ashley, and she is most certainly not a man, despite this website's 78% percent certainty that she is.

So what is it that constitutes "masculine" writing? A good vocabulary and grasp of basic grammar? Is that why so many of my girls are getting labeled as boys?

This whole thing just has me a bit confused. Go check it out yourself. What does a stranger's algorithm say about you?