The universe is pregnant with invisible beauty waiting to be uncovered. Creative visualisation of abstract data reveals the innate beauty which permeates every aspect of our world. From the “poetry of logarithms” to the names we give our children…

I recently stumbled across Wordle: an online toy for generating beautiful “word clouds”. If you’re familiar with a tag cloud, you’re understand Wordle. Wordle was designed to be a way to visualise the semantic content of texts, giving greater prominence to words appearing more frequently. It’s been used to visualise everything from blogs to presidential speeches.

I thought it would be interesting to use Wordle to visualise the popularity of baby names using records from the Social Security Administration. With a dash of custom programming to tie it all together, hey presto: baby name word clouds.

These images visualise the popularity of the top 500 names for boys and girls based on the SSA’s data for 2007.

There are some interesting insights to be gleaned from comparing the images. For example, you will probably notice more definitive standouts among the girl names than the boys. That’s because the popularity of the top girls names is more concentrated around the top 10 names than is that of the boys names.

Our new baby name search engine was just released. You can use it to search for names based on recent and historical popularity, as well as many other attributes such as rhythmic stress patterns and associations. Check it out.

It’s been a brilliant first week for the Baby Name Brainstorm. We launched only eight days ago, and already we’re beginning to see a nice stream of visitors through the blog and to the Brainstormer as well. Thanks in large part to Lola and Nancy who are our top referrers and commentors. Thanks for your support guys.

A big thanks also to everyone who voted in our recent poll to decide the focus of further development on the Brainstormer. Of the four candidate features that were up, it looks like favourites are the current priority so we will be focusing our efforts on that over the next couple of weeks and hopefully bringing out a new version of the tool before Christmas.

Now, If I’m reading our web stats correctly it seems that only a small fraction of the visitors to this blog actually end up finding and launching the Brainstormer. Obviously, this is a great shame, so I’ve tried to raise its profile of the tool further by adding an image preview to the sidebar and on the about page.

If this is your first visit, be sure to check it out.

We want YOU to help us decide the future of the Brainstormer!

Naming your children is a wonderful opportunity for self-exploration and creative expression. It’s also essential in defining your child’s sense of identity (Etilia Aden, Baby Name Stats).

Our vision

Baby Name Brainstorm is here to help stimulate your own creativity and provide interesting name suggestions without resort to eye-glazing, alphabetical lists.

Our advantage is three fold:

• speed (explore the name space without waiting for page reloads)
• engagement (our unique, animated graph makes name-storming all the more fun)
• visualisation (stimulates the right brain, unleashing your natural creativity)

Our early efforts have focused on word phonetics; but this is just the beginning. We’re building a powerful name-association engine to be not only fun, but insightful. You can help by telling us which of these you think you could get the most value out of.

Community Feature Building: Round 1

Please vote for which feature you would most like to see introduced into the brainstormer first.

• Favourites: bookmark your favourite names in the graph so you can list them and return to them quickly.
• Namesakes: see which notable people from history, literature and pop-culture have a particular name; follow associations among them.
• Themes: create your own designer name themes and share them with the world.
• Meanings: see the meaning and origin of names in the graph; find names which share similar meanings.

[polldaddy poll="1122702"]

If you’ve ever taken part in a brainstorming session or played word association games, the Brainstormer should feel pretty natural to you.

Brainstorming is based on the principle of association—one idea suggests another, which leads to another and so on. 

Baby Name Brainstorm was designed along these lines. It helps you generate name ideas by finding associations between a name you already like, and others which you might not have thought of yet.

Here’s how it works…

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