Readability of Web 2.0 Content

Readability. Authors, marketers and webmasters know that it matters, but as communities form up around niches of similar interest, the requirements of “write like your audience is in 3rd grade” have loosened greatly. I recently came upon a piece of software called “Text Master Pro“. The program analyzes the complexity of vocabulary used in content to determine a UV (readability) score. Despite my usual refusal to use any software with the word “pro” in the title, I fired it up and ran it on the sites listed on 8 different popular web 2.0 sites. I continued to do this with their individual feeds over the course of the week to get an average readability of the content posted to their sites. Here are the results. I also include...