Blogs for Everything
In the spirit of Marginal Revolution's "markets in everything" series, I think I will start a "blogs for everything" series. One of my favorite early on in this series was the Remote Blog, blogging on home theater remote control issues.
In this episode, we feature the Baby Names Blog, from the Baby Name Wizard. It has pretty interesting features on names and why they go in and out of style. And make sure to check out their name voyager, a cool java app on name popularity over the last century.
When we named our first child Nicholas, we soon found that we were on the front edge of a huge Nicholas revival. For our second child, we wanted something less common, so we chose Amelia, which was way out of favor at the time but now appears to be in a revival as well. The one thing that stands out from the chart is that 50 years ago, there were a few dominant names: John, Mary, etc. Now, there are no dominant names. I think this is signaling a change in parents attitude, from wanting their name to be safe and fit in, to wanting their kids' names to be unique and distinctive. Certainly this was the case for us.
