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Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name

Posted by michael on from the ragnar-ragnarsson dept.

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."

2 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Data from the government by bko · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Very nifty db. If i had moderator points, i would be slightly tempted to mod you up rather than post. Slightly.

    Favorite stat from 10 seconds of perusal:

    Popularity of the name Trinity:

    Year of birth Rank
    2001 67
    2000 74
    1999 216
    1998 555
    1997 547
    1996 687
    1995 683
    1994 821
    1993 951

    Curious, isn't it. Something seems to have caused a sudden jump in popularity in the middle of 1999!

    While i really enjoyed the matrix, i can't say that it ever occured to me that it would cause a sudden spike in people naming their daughters trinity.

  2. What's a Last Name? by linuxdoctor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My own family didn't have last names until after the First World War and the loss land and power after that war. We were identified by our membership in particular Royal houses. We were addressed as Emperor, or King, or Duke, or Prince with the appropriate titles that went with it.

    With the First World War and beginning with the English Royal Family abandoning it's German roots by adopting the name of Windsor, they set the tone for the dismantling of the house system. My great-great-granduncle, German Kaiser Wilhelm II at the time of the English abandonment of their heritage, remarked that he always enjoyed the comic operetta "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha," a reference to the British Royal family's true German name. Two of those house names are also part of my name.

    My own grandfather, an Archduke in the Austrian Empire had to abandon his titles and adopted a name that was taken from the name of the his ancestral home in the south of Austria. He was later appraoched by Hitler to help with the union of Austria and Germany, but categorically refused him. After the anschlus in 1938 his vocal anti-Nazi stance got him into more trouble and his lands were seized.

    This is all probably not very interesting, and I'll probably loose a few karma point by this post. But who cares? There is no such thing as Karma anyway.