Yesterday I sat in a meeting where someone declared that from just a zip code and year of birth, they can extrapolate all the information a marketing person would need. Huh?
I've never been one to believe statistics. Frankly, Mark Twain probably said it best when he said the bit about three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I figure marketers are usually full of crap when they think they know who you are, especially if they're depending on user-provided information, such as registration for online news sites. As far as the NY Times is concerned, I'm a 80-year-old Asian woman making $100K a year. Hey, they lie, so can I. I prefer to remain somewhat of an enigma, thankyouverymuch.
But it turns out I've been giving away more than I thought on my blog.
A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use.
For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do.
[...]
Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such as "the," "this" and "that" - because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.
I haven't applied this theory to blogs, because honestly, I just don't feel like counting a bunch of words and putting them in the male/female columns. But I figure if I can find a font that lets me dot the "i"s with little hearts, and finish up that Hello Kitty template, I might be able to wreck the curve a bit. Wish me luck.
Posted by bert at May 31, 2003 05:00 AM | TrackBack