JasonMorrison.net

Ann and I ended up in the news again today, this time in a New York Post article about Twitter. I used Twitter to send out updates on what was going on during labor. I’m probably not the first to do it, but it’s an interesting use case for an article like this, aimed at introducing some new tech that’s been popping up more and more in popular culture.

But when I noticed the accompanying photoillustration I had to post this screenshot. Notice anything a little off?

Click here to see the full-sized screenshot. The caption text seems to imply that it’s a photo of Ann. For those of you who don’t know us personally, Ann’s not actually a white person like miss stock photo here.

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Hello World!

Thanks to the well over 10,000 people who voted in our baby name poll, we’ve chosen the perfect name for our new baby – Athena Marie Morrison.

Those of you who have been following this story might be a bit surprised at the name choice, since Olivia was leading the poll for girls’ names.  But the very, very few readers who managed to make their way through my boring (but educational) statistics posts will remember that Ann and I controlled for popularity, hoping to pick a name that was loved by our voters but still reasonably unique and interesting.

We took three names that our voters liked better than could be explained by general popularity in 2007 – Cassia, Ada, and Athena – and waited to see which name would fit her best.

Since our baby was born with her eyes open, perceptive and looking very thoughtful, we thought it was appropriate to name her for the goddess of wisdom.

Thanks again to all the family, friends, Googlers, and random internet strangers who voted.

If you’d like to keep following Athena’s first days on the planet, you can follow me on Twitter.

For photos (a few now, and hundreds more as soon as we get home), feel free to friend me on Flickr.

If you’d like to read more about web design, usability, and doing crazy social experiments with the internet, please subscribe to my blog feed or subscribe via email.

We’re at the hospital, so hopefully I’ll have news soon.  If you weren’t on the email list from the baby name poll, or aren’t already connected to me on Twitter or Facebook, I’ll be posting updates as we get breaks:

http://twitter.com/iamjason

It’s pretty amazing how we’re able to keep in touch with everyone, all over the world.  How did people have babies before the Internet?

Earlier I wrote about my experience on Australian TV. They’ve put the clip up on The Morning Show website but they don’t allow direct links or have an embedding feature, so I did some digging in the JS/Flash code and put it below.

They put in a photo montage so some of my family, friends, and co-workers are famous in Australia too.

If anyone wants to know how to embed videos from this site or other Yahoo TV sites, let me know and I’ll post more details. They really ought to just stick each video on it’s own URL and add some embed widgets. It’s not too hard to do, and it’s part of the reason YouTube became so popular.

Thanks to everyone who voted and sent us your suggestions. We’re getting very close to the due date, so I’m officially shutting down votes tomorrow. We’ve decided to make the final choice once the baby is born, just in case the kid has some suggestions of their own. Watch this space for news, hopefully soon.

In the mean time, here are a few things I’ve learned:

• Spreadsheets are the next frontier in web2.0 social networking. No kidding.
• Blog posts about babies are much more popular than posts about statistics.
• Let random people vote on a baby name over the internet, and a few will spam the form or enter nasty stuff, but the vast majority will give you helpful suggestions. Way to go, Internet.

Here’s the form, get your vote in by end of day Friday, November 14th.

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

Okay, I stole the title from John Hodgman, who spoke at Google recently. And to be really fair, I should add more modifiers to the title, “briefly famous” being much more accurate.

Hodgman, who writes in the great tradition of literary nonsense, has a very entertaining story of minor fame in his new book More Information Than You Require. He has inspired me to write a a less entertaining story about the minor internet fame that our baby naming project has bestowed upon me.

Earlier today I was interviewed on The Morning Show, broadcast all across the great nation-continent of Australia. Since my kayak is in the shop, I was to go to KNTV in San Jose where the interview would be done live via satellite.

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We’ve got well over 10,000 votes, we know that the vote totals are significantly different from random, so do we have enough information to pick a name yet?

There’s another stats exercise I want to go through before we narrow down the list.  We want to pick a name that people have voted for, but we’d also like to choose a name that’s not too popular.  This is just a personal preference that Ann and I have, we think it’s a little more fun to have a more unique name.

Also, it would be pretty boring if the vote gives us the exact same information as a list of most popular baby names.  So, how to do we choose a name that’s popular with friends and family (and in our case, random internet strangers), that’s still reasonably unique?

Based on the chart below, names that fit our criteria include Ada, Cassia, Athena, Erin, or Olivia for a girl and Nikolas, Levi, Isaac, Dylan or Alexander for a boy.  Follow along and I’ll explain where I got the data and how it helps me pick names.

Link to the full-sized graph at Flickr.

The graph you see above is a scatterplot of the names, showing the vote total versus the number of babies given that name in the U.S. in 2007.  For example, Isaac has 1220 votes as of this writing and 10,066 babies were named Isaac in 2007.

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Now that we have more than 10,000 votes in our baby name poll I can start doing some basic statistical analysis.  One of the things I’d like to do is figure out which names are popular in our poll, but still relatively unique compared to all those other babies being named out there.

Before I get to that, though, I want to make sure that our vote totals are significantly different from random.

Heads up:  What follows is a basic intro to some concepts in statistics that I’m writing mainly to keep myself sharp.  I haven’t done much research recently and I don’t want to get rusty.  Feel free to read along, at the end I’ll show you how to detect the influence of Australians.

Since the data for names included in the poll is completely different from the write-in votes, we’ll concentrate on the pre-selected names for now.

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This is just a short update before I head to work – we’ve passed 10,000 votes in our baby name poll. This has been a pretty incredible experience, thanks to everyone who voted and posted comments here.

Next up, I’m going to see how the results differ if we add weight to votes from friends and family, and I’m also going to see what happens if we normalize for baby name popularity.

In the mean time, here are the 20 most popular suggestions for our voters:

Girls:

Boys:

If you haven’t voted yet, here’s a link to the form.

At this point we’re well past 4,500 votes in our baby name poll. We had a huge surge in votes recently as stories appeared in the international press and blogs all over the world. This is becoming a pretty wild ride, and will make a great story for our little Morrison to tell years from now. Thanks to everyone who has participated so far.

So… what happens when you ask the World Wide Web to name your child?

I’ll share the literal results below. Beyond the raw data, though, what happens when you try to crowdsource you’re kid’s moniker? It’s a bit of a risk – we’ve opened ourselves up to the possibility of criticism, abuse, and pranksterism during a very emotional time in our lives.

This little project still ongoing, and the baby isn’t due yet for another month, but at this point I can give you a little advice about using the web to involve family, friends, and even perfect strangers in your life’s – or your work’s – decisions:

• Set the tone – We’re serious about using everyone’s votes and suggestions in our decision, but we realize this is a pretty goofy way to choose a name. So that’s how we presented it – fun, a bit geeky, but actually quite useful. If you’re wondering about the secret of Google’s success, you have my guess right there.
• Expect abuse and embrace pranksterism – Our voting form has been spammed and we’ve been called some rather nasty names. Those are both unfortunate, but you know what? The vast majority of the people voting and commenting have been helpful, earnest, and encouraging. And funny suggestions, when they are actually funny, should be celebrated, not repressed or cast aside. Pompous decorum and solemnity are straight out – you’re not doing anyone any favors by letting them participate, you’re inviting them to join in the fun.
• Make it interesting – I’m not sure we would have had the same reaction if we wanted the world to vote on what we should have for dinner tomorrow, but people really love coming up with baby names. They love making videos of Stephen Colbert. They love picking a new theme song for hockey night. And if you really do need advice on dinner tomorrow, involve a group of friends or local foodies, pick people who will be interested in adding their advice.

Another way to look at it is the framework presented in the Wisdom of Crowds:

• Diversity of opinion – We have really lucked out on this one, since we have votes from all around the world (and feel free to give your home town / home country a shout out in the comments below).
• Independence – There’s discussion on this site and others, and people can always check the leaderboards, but for the most part people have been giving us names with very personal, independent reasoning behind them.
• Decentralization – We have input from family who have known us all our lives as well as strangers, and there’s no obviously complicated hierarchy or committee to act as a bottleneck.
• Aggregation – You can see some of the ways we’re looking at the data already and in the coming days I’ll add even more.

Let me repeat one point, just because it’s so astonishing – we’ve really put ourselves, and our unborn child’s appellation, out there. Any abusive behavior has been vastly outweighed by good wishes and helpful contributions. So thanks again, unwashed masses of the interwebs. And now, the suggestions:

Baby name suggestions

You can see the earlier summary graphs and charts here and here. Below are the big lists of suggested names.

Suggestions for boys names:

Suggestions for girls names: