Monthly Archives: September 2008

Internet Baby Naming Update

Friends, family, my co-workers at Google, and random strangers on the internet have contributed more than 500 votes for our kid’s name. At this point we have some clear favorites, with Dylan leading the boys chart and Olivia and Ada pulling ahead on the girls chart.

I’ve decided to move all the charts to this post, I’ll try to add updates with more detail as time goes on.

First, the graph of the most popular Girls’ names:

EDIT: Well, it turns out I made some pretty crazy formulas and broke my own charts. I’ll have an update soon to tell you how to make cool charts and how not to break them. The voting form works, though, so don’t be afraid to contribute.

DOUBLE EDIT: I’ve put in static versions of the charts while I work on fixing my spreadsheet.

Here’s the graph of the most popular Boys’ names:

Here’s a familiar, if not cognitively optimum, pie chart showing who has been voting:

Just for fun, here are graphs of some of the leading names’ popularity since the 1880s from the wonderful Baby Name Wizard website.

The only problem with these graphs is that they don’t give an identifiable scale. So, you can’t easily compare the different name graphs below – note that the darker the hue, the more babies had that name.

Olivia:

Popularity of names starting with OLIVIA

OLIVIA

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Hey Internet, Help Us Name Our Child!

Happy Anniversary at Sarava My wife and I are expecting, and thus we have to pick a name for our new baby. We’ve perused baby name websites and tried the Freakonomics tactic of predicting popular names, but to be honest none of it was really working.

As a Googler, though, the answer should have been obvious – let the Internet do it! So that’s what we’re doing, opening up our baby’s name to an Internet-wide vote.*

In the next couple days I’ll also put up a live graph of the results. If you’d like to learn how to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets to put a poll on your site (or name your baby), check out this post.

Feel free to send this link to your friends, put it up on social news sites, or write about it on your blog – the more votes the better.

If you can’t see the poll, follow this link to get to it.

EDIT: Here’s a little preview graph, with the most popular boys’ and girls’ names so far. I’ll add a graph with user-suggested names soon too.

DOUBLE EDIT: I’ve moved the graphs to the next page, so as not to influence the voting.

TRIPLE EDIT: The form isn’t working for some readers, it looks like all the visitors from neatorama have taken Docs by surprise. I’ll talk to some folks at work tomorrow. If you can’t see the form, please try back again a little later. If you subscribe to my blog you’ll see an update when I’m sure everything’s okay.

* We do reserve the right to ignore the results of the poll completely. Otherwise we’ll end up with a kid named Mr. Splashy Pants. Actually, that has a nice ring to it…

Quick Tip: Keeping Comment Compliment Spam off your Blog

Blogs are great because they give you a creative outlet and let your readers comment on you posts, making it a much more social experience.  But spammers take advantage of comment forms, using scripts and bots to fill the web with links back to their site.

What can you do about it?  Even with captchas, systems like Akismet, and other automatic techniques (you can read more about these here), some spam will slip through.  Specifically, compliment spam.

What is compliment spam? Spammers know you and I like to be told what great writers we are, how helpful our posts are, and that we are brilliant geniuses.  So they set their bots to spam you with complimentary comments that just so happen to link back to their crappy blog, online casino, or fake viagra store.  Here’s an example:

Typolight
http://www.typolight-blog.de | info@typolight-blog.de | 82.146.49.61

Thanks, you nice post that helped me alot.

From Keep your WordPress site from being hacked with automatic upgrades, 2008/09/06 at 9:27 AM

So, at first glance this looks like a legit comment.  The post in question was a “how-to”, so it would be nice to hear that someone found my instructions helpful.  But, do a Google search with the comment in quotes (an exact phrase search) and you’ll see the problem:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Thanks%2C+you+nice+post+that+helped+me+alot.%22

At the time of this writing, we see 168 instances of this exact comment.  By this same Typolight person.

So that’s my tip – if a comment seems a bit too randomly complimentary, throw it in quotes and do a Google search. Then, if it’s spam, make sure to spam it – systems like Akismet only work because we’re all reporting spam.

If you really want to go after the spam poster, you can also give their site a bad rating on Web of Trust, StumbleUpon, and other reporting systems.

Maybe if I get some time I’ll throw together a WordPress plugin to make this easy to do.  If you’d like a plugin like this (or have other tips), drop me a comment and it will help motivate me.