JasonMorrison.net

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?

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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I’m not going to turn this into a full-time political blog, but I just spent the evening researching local issues and candidates and a thought occurred to me – does anyone test the usability and the user experience of the democratic process?

There’s a number of different ways to approach this question.  The usability of voting systems is a big part of it, and in the case of electronic voting machines, this would be identical to traditional usability testing.  I’m going to put that question aside for now since I haven’t studied it very closely and talk about the information seeking portion of the electoral user experience.

Also, I apologize in advance for making this post very U.S.-centric.  Please comment below on how these issues apply in your country.

Political information seeking

We are completely inundated with information and misinformation about the major candidates for national office, from a wide variety of communication media.  Everything from dinner-table conversations and door-to-door canvassing to cable news, candidate web sites, and political blogs can influence how we vote.

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