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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."

3 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Data from the government by syr · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  2. Men and Women by wizarddc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was having a little thought experiment going through these lists of names and such, and something dawned on me. It's fairly obvious from the data on these lists that men's names hang around a lot longer than women, and generally, it seems the top 10 was very stable in males (up until very recently, I had no idea Jacob was that popular...) while female names change top 10 at least once a generation. I was thnking why this happened, and when you think of female names, there are definitely "old" sounding names compared to males. No one thinks James or Robert sounds old, but Mildred and Ruth sound like older women's names. The one thing that came to me is that women "don't want to end up like their mother" while men look up to their father, even after he chops your hand off in a lightsaber battle. It seems like women's names gain a stigma of "old", and it's worse for a woman to be old than a man, so women name their daughter's newer, cuter names, where men respect their elders more (or something), so continue the line of Michael's and William's. Or I'm a sexist nutjob who should actually be working at work instead of reading /.

    --
    Th
  3. Re:Well as long as you're not Michael Bolton.... by catch23 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Actually I think the most applicable quote is this one:

    Michael: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
    Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
    Michael: There WAS nothing wrong with it. Until I was about 12 years old, and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
    Samir: Well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?.
    Michael: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!