Lee and Paul, the Jay and Silent Bob of client-side code have been cooking up some excellent stuff.
Paul wrote a plug-in for MoveableType that performs statistical analysis on the words in each blog entry, including measures of readability.
Lee has taken this and now outputs a little bar-graph measure of how readable each post on his blog is. Lovely!
One lazyweb idea:
- take a RSS blogroll/subscriptions list
- take all the feeds, run them through a statistical word analysis and apply readbility index.
- pump out a little graph/blogroll to your site of who is being readable that day.
Other thoughts on this as a feedback mechanism – how will this affect Lee’s writing? How could you marry this readability information with more subjective measures, such as reader-ratings, or frequency of posts (e.g. if you’re liveblogging from a conference, or taking notes live on a PDA as Lee often does, you might want to compensate)
Petafloptimism 
Nice thinking. Flesch-Kincaid et al are fairly limited as measures of readability. In fact, blog-roll lists are nicely self-organised anyway and provide great clues as to “readability”. Frankly, any blog community has an entry barrier that isn’t to do with the number of syllables per paragraph but the tone and the argot of that community.
i lik to meet with you.