A couple of weeks ago, I launched WTFLevel. It was an idea that I originally conceived several years ago, but it took a long time before I got around to building it. Other things came first. A huge chunk of my life is filled with parenting, working for Bandzoogle, taking care of our house, etc. But I always try to push myself to have a creative project of some sort that I can work on in my spare time. And I have a huge list of ridiculous things I'd like to work on someday. Lucky for me, I have an awesome partner who supports my projects, even when they drive her crazy.

When it comes to personal projects, I work on things that will make me happy. Broad appeal is never a big factor for me -- if it was, I wouldn't devote time to reviews of books not worth reviewing, and things like random name generators. The Twitter bots I've written are all bots that I wanted to see, and in the past when people have asked me to write one for them, I have always turned them down.

My biggest problem with personal projects is knowing when to let go. I started coding WTFLevel a couple months ago, and tinkered with it endlessly. I probably didn't spend more than 12 hours actually working on it, spread over a couple of evenings, before it was a fully functional website - basically what it looks like now. But then I spent forever fiddling with the layout, colors, etc, and convincing myself that no one would like it and that the concept was lame.

Eventually I gave myself the goal of launching the site in time for Election Night. The day before the election, I forced myself to stop tinkering and I published the site. I posted about it on Twitter and Facebook, and let my friends know the URL.

I was pretty happy with the response. I got a few hundred visits in the first week, and a lot of positive feedback, which was more than I expected. I was glad to have launched it in time for the election - the swearing levels that night were insanely high - only the shitstorm that was Hurricane Sandy has even gotten close. Traffic dropped off a day or two after the election, and I was satisfied that it had been an interesting project that would probably not get too much more interest.

At the end of that week, when the craze had worn off, I was fiddling with some data, and checking the logs to make sure that a change I had made was working properly, and I noticed that the site was getting traffic. A lot of traffic. After a little poking around I discovered that someone had posted the site to metafilter. That was pretty exciting! It turns out that a friend of mine told another friend, who posted it to metafilter, and after that, things got crazy.

Within a couple of days, WTFLevel was posted on theverge, reddit, a bunch of design-related sites, and the NBC News technology blog. In all, the site has gotten around 20,000 visitors, and a lot of mentions on Twitter. @wtflevel currently has well over 200 followers. The traffic has calmed down again, but I've still been getting hundreds of visits a day.

One of the things that has made me happiest is that someone used the public API I wrote up to make an Android App - not bad!

For some people, this wouldn't be a big deal, but it makes it one of the biggest random projects I've ever worked on. Anyway, I'll continue to fiddle with the site, especially once there's a couple months of data to analyze, but so far I've been really happy with how things have worked out. It feels really good to have something take off like this.

I added a new feature to WTFlevel.com a couple of days ago -- it now shows leaderboards for the top periods of sustained swearing on Twitter. I've included two types of data here -- the top 6-hour timespans, and the top 24-hour timespans. You can see the rate of swearing for that period, as well as the top words used in that time.

A bit about the top words -- I filter out all the swears from this data since the swearing itself isn't necessarily that interesting -- trying to figure out why people are swearing has a lot more value.

Not too shockingly, they are basically the few biggest events of the last month or so -- the election, Hurricane Sandy, and a bit of the World Series as well.

Here's the hour so far (These times are in US Eastern time BTW):

Time: 10pm - 11pm Nov 6th

Rate: 10.72%

Words: romney obama election stupid white black

Here's the top 6-hour span:

Time: 3am - 9am Nov 7th

Rate: 9.72%

Words: obama president romney school morning black

And here's the top 24-hour span:

Time: 10am Oct 28th - 10am Oct 29th

Rate: 7.5%

Words: tomyfutureson sandy giants hurricane future

Finally, I noticed some people on Twitter complaining that I haven't released the list of swears that WTFlevel searches for. I also noticed people swearing a lot trying to bump the rate on the site. Guess what -- those two things are related! Anyway, I think most people are creative enough to guess the top 10 or so swears in the list.

Today I'm launching WTFlevel.com, a website that tracks the rate and magnitude of swearing on Twitter, and displays the data in real-time with a couple of snazzy dynamic charts. I wanted to launch it in time for the election, and I just made it.

PREDICTION there will be a lot of swearing tomorrow and the next day on Twitter.

I have worked on a number of projects with Twitter - there are a handful of bots that mostly entertain people, and a library devoted to building them, along with a few other random unpublished/discarded projects. Anyway, Twitter can be fairly annoying, and I doubt their API will last in its current form for too much longer, but it's still fun to work with their data.

Over time I noticed that people on Twitter swear a lot. I started wondering - do people swear more online than they do in real life? And could you identify trends or useful information in the rates of cursing on Twitter? WTFLevel.com is an attempt to begin to answer those questions.

Using the Twitter Streaming API, I scan tweets for a collection a swear words and other curse-like expressions. I calculate two values from that data: the rate of tweets which contain swears to those that do not contain swears, and also the magnitude of sweariness in those tweets. For example, a tweet with more swears in it has a higher magnitude than one which only has one swear in it.

For fun, I invented a threat level scale, basically a spoof of the Homeland Security threat level, since the notion of color-coded threat levels hasn't been sufficiently mocked yet.

I also tried to keep in mind the DEFCON system which always gave me chills during my childhood. And of course, who could forget this scene from War Games:

The level is assigned according to the current rate of swearing, with a little math tossed in to predict if the rate is increasing or decreasing. The colored bars displayed on the graph correspond to the levels.

I made a decision when I started the project to only look at tweets that are reported as being in English, and to only look for English swear words. This meant that I couldn't get a really good idea of the global swearing status, but I don't really have the knowledge to implement a decent system for tracking swears in other languages. That said, I am really amazed to see that people swear a lot more what is roughly the evening hours in America.

I expected to see a more constant level of swearing through the day. It's not like there aren't reasons to swear in the morning or something. So while I worked on the website, I spent a little time researching the use of profanity in real life, to get an idea of how it compares to online usage. According to Wikipedia's article on Profanity:

Analyses of recorded conversations reveal that roughly 80–90 spoken words each day – 0.5% to 0.7% of all words – are swear words, with usage varying from between 0% to 3.4%. In comparison, first-person plural pronouns (we, us, our) make up 1% of spoken words.

Over two months of monitoring, I found that about 6.97% of tweets had a swear in them. I need to work out the word count for that, but it would seem to be roughly comparable to this analysis. By the way, the article cited by Wikipedia is fascinating.

But I find it really interesting that there's an evening peak in the data. Since we're measuring the rate here, and not the totals, I expected swearing to be at least somewhat constant -- it didn't seem like there would be a reason for there to be fewer sweary tweets in the morning as opposed to the evening. I need to do a little digging into the data to see if I can figure out if there's anything obvious that can explain what is happening here. I might also change the output a bit -- it's interesting to see the current rate of swearing, but it might also be interesting to know how much higher/lower it is than it usually is for the given time of day.

If you like to follow computer programs on Twitter, you can follow @WTFLevel, and get notifications whenever shit blows up or calms down.

Tweets by @WTFLevel

Technical Notes

If you care about how things like this are implemented, then you can check out the WTFlevel implementation details.

About a year ago, during the Occupy movement, I wrote this post about the different ways that people subvert Amazon reviews for art and humor. Looks like people are still at it, and after Mitt Romney's amazing mention of binders in the second debate of 2012, the reviews piled in for Avery Binders on Amazon.

I am so excited to order this binder! My husband said that I've been doing such a great job of cutting out of work early to serve him meat and potatoes all these years, and he's finally letting me upgrade from a 2-ring without pockets to a binder with 3 rings and two pockets! The pockets excite me the most. I plan to use the left pocket to hold my resume which will highlight my strongest skills which include but are not limited to laughing while eating yogurt. The right pocket will be great for keeping my stash of aspirin, in case of emergencies when I need to hold it between my knees.

For any of you who might be considering, like me, purchasing this binder based on the reviews, let me just point out one glaring omission: While this is a lovely, multi-purpose binder, IT DOES NOT COME WITH WOMEN. Presumably one is expected to find women on one's own, or contact women's groups who are supposedly eager to help stock your empty binder with women.

For a first time buyer like myself, I have to say I would rather have waited until I had accumulated a few women before investing in a binder. Just a little warning for prospective buyers.

I was originally going to rate this only 1 star. You see, I'm a big girl and I can only squeeze about 53% of myself into this binder. But then I decided that I'm not going to worry about the other 47%.

I'm proud to say that I'm in this binder. I've spend 20 years working my way up from Walmart mom to soccer mom, and finally, I've hit the glass ceiling. I'm a binder mom! I highly recommend this binder I'm in, but be aware that if you purchase it, you must be flexible and let me put a ham in the oven by 5. Otherwise, my kids might resort to gun violence.

Awesome. See also here, here, here, here, and here. That's just the first half-dozen results for 'binder' on Amazon -- I'm sure there's more.

I like to joke about the Mitchell Corn Palace, but this is video takes it to a new level.