JasonMorrison.net

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:

Back when I was in college I did an interview with a journalism student at Kent State about online publishing.  I ran across it sort of randomly on my hard drive and thought I would share how I described my relationship with the Internet:

I’m an old-timer when it comes to the Internet.  I began playing around online some time in middle school, back when everything was text and the Internet was more or less just a way to pass messages between local bulletin board systems and universities.  I made my first web site back in high school, and it was a pretty pathetic homepage.

Wow, eight years ago (!) I already described myself as an old-timer.  It’s strange how so much of my life has revolved around the web and kind of fitting that I’m now on a team that helps safegaurd it.

I wrote a little earlier about what I was looking forward to in HTML 5.  I haven’t had a chance to really collect my thoughts about XHTML 2 vs HTML 5, to be honest I’d be happy to see progress on both fronts.  I do have to say I lost interest in XHTML 2 early on when it seemed they were throwing some baby out with the bathwater.  HTML is not the cleanest, most elegant language but the ease of picking it up is part of why the web grew so quickly.  Even if that has forced browsers to cope with millions of pages of clunky, broken HTML.

Eric Meyer has at least one point in XHTML 2’s favor - the ability to add and href attribute to anything, making it a link.  In addition to making the <a> tag jealous, this would let you do some pretty cool stuff like turn an entire table row into a link in a dynamic data reporting web app without a lot of Javascript or duplicated tags.

By the way Eric is a fellow member of the Cleveland Web Standards Association and a great speaker.  If you get a chance to see a talk by him you should really check it out.

The Word Wide Web has grown at an astounding pace and is pretty ingrained in a lot of our daily lives - you’re reading it right now. Part of the reason it has been so successful has been the flexibility and ease of use of the basic language of web pages, HTML.

Most web sites are developed in HTML 4 (first released in 1997) or XHTML (from 2000). Considering the rapid change all around the web, why hasn’t there been a new version, and what’s next for the Web? One reason we haven’t seen new versions is the aforementioned flexibility. There have been plenty of developments, from blogging software and other content management systems on the server side to CSS, AJAX, and embedded Flash video on the front end.

Microformats are a part of this and will be a big part of the future too. But all the web developers in the house should get up to speed on HTML 5, which looks to be the future of the Web.

I’ve been watching what the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has been doing with HTML 5 ever since I took a gander at the W3C’s XHTML 2 spec and figured out that they were mostly adding annoyance and removing backwards compatibility. Guys I respect, like Eric Meyer, seemed to agree. The WHATWG decided to work on their own ideas and came up with HTML, which was eventually adopted by the W3C as well.

I haven’t taken a look in a while but Marcia Zeng mentioned the HTML 5 spec in an email recently and it got me interested in checking back in. I have to say, for the most part, it’s looking very interesting.

So I decided to put together a quick list of my top 10 new things in HTML 5:

1. The <nav> element. This will be great for the billions of navbars we web developers have been coding up for the past 10 years. Things like this will help reduce the problem of div soup and make structure more apparent.
2. The <header> and <footer> elements. See the last entry and add in the billions of page headers and footers we’ve produced as well. Semantically meaningful tags like these can only help browser plugin writers, search engine programmers, and other hackers to come up with cool new features.
3. The death of the dreaded <font> tag. This should have been banished as soon as CSS was widely supported. It was a pain in the rear to use back in the 1990s when coding by hand, and was even worse when inserted by GUI tools like FrontPage.
4. The continued usefulness of the <img> element. You may be wondering how we could make web pages without the image element, but XHTML2 only included it grudgingly, recommending everyone use <object> instead. The problem is that just about anything could be an object, the tag is almost meaningless. Why not replace all tags with <thing>?
5. The <audio> and <video> elements. There’s been some controversy about this, because the W3C originally recommended use of the open source Ogg formats but later recanted. Still, it will be nice to embed audio and video as easily and consistently as images are used now.
6. New <input> types for dates, urls, etc. When you have a form that requires a user input a date or some other specialized data, you choices have been to present a plain text input or jazz things up with JavaScript to make it a bit more usable. HTML 5 adds specific types for these cases.
7. The conenteditable API. This will be really interesting if it’s fully supported. In Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the web, documents would be easily editable. Wikis get us almost there, but a standard editing API would be even better.
8. A required attribute for form inputs. This won’t mean we can stop checking incoming data on the server side (users can still POST arbitrary data with the right tools) but it should remove the need for millions of little field-checking JavaScripts.
9. The <figure> and <legend> elements. This will make it a little easier to associate captions and other text to images. Look for CMSs and image search engines to take advantage of these tags.
10. An open development process. Want to keep an eye on development? Got an idea or concern about the spec? Hop on one of the mailing lists. Open standards are great for promoting compatibility and competition, so open development of the standards just makes sense.

Introduction

Just as the Internet has had an impact on the market for information goods and services, it has also had an impact on the information necessary for markets to function. Perfectly competitive markets, upon which models of economics are based, require four key characteristics:

• Many sellers.
• Nearly identical products.
• Easy market entry (and exit).
• Buyers and sellers have perfect information.

The last point is possibly the most difficult. Good information is hard to come by, let alone perfect information, for both buyers and sellers. Buyers are perhaps at a disadvantage, but the rise of the online marketplace and specifically price aggregating web sites has created an interesting change.

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