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10,000 Votes in our Baby Name Project

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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.

Google Spreadsheets Time Series Chart of Baby Name Votes

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Here’s a time series chart of the first 1000 votes in our baby name poll. This shows vote totals over time using the exact same interface as the stock charts in Google Finance.

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.

EDIT: the chart is a little hard to read in my narrow blog format, here’s a link to the full-sized version.

The first jump on September 8th came from sending out the link to friends and family via email, through my blog, and over Facebook. The second jump, starting after 5 p.m. or so, came from an internal mailing list at work. From there the votes slowly accumulated until October 2nd, when this was featured in the internal news at work. The poll has been picked up on a couple of forums and websites now, which probably accounts for the rate increase on the 3rd.

How did I create the chart? On your spreadsheet, click the “Insert Gadget” link and choose Interactive Time Series Chart. You’ll need at least two columns, one with the timestamps from your form, and another with the vote count. Since every row represents a vote, I just used the ROW() function in the second column to get the count.

I’m still working on getting it to update automatically as new votes come in, and I’ll also see if I can get the graph to show lines for each name to see relative popularity over time.

Internet Baby Naming Update

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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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