Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name

gummint writes "After contemplating the blogsphere and pondering whether "diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality", consider an old-media domain name: the one your parents gave you. How did they choose it? How many other persons have the same one? Get some facts, or a lot of facts. Or just comment anyway. The good news is that the extent of inequality can change massively over time: the popularity of the most popular given names has decreased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution."

Comments

Data from the government

[syr]

The Social Security Administration has a database with information on the most popular baby names of about the past 100 years.

Sort by decade or year of birth. Pretty interesting, imo. It's fun to watch which names stay on the top 10 for decades in a row and which were popular at one point and then declined dramatically.

GameTab - Game Reviews Database

Re:Screw my given name

[z_gringo]

Many countries have laws to prevent this sort of thing. Im not sure about the U.S., but Germany requires that someone be named with an "appropriate" name, and in the case of dual nationality, they should have a name appropriate in both countries. A recent example was when a Turkish couple wanted to name their child Osama, but that was not allowed.

Previously in Belgium, you had to use a name from an approved list, which means that if you were dual nationality Belgium/Spanish, Miguel would become Michell, or Santiago may become James.. (Im not positive what santiago would become, its just an example)....

but anyway, in many places, I dont think you can actually change your name to: qwrtpsdfghjklñzxcvbnm....

But then Cher has done well.. I should change mine to "Z", just like MIB...