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’re like most new parents you’ve probably already got a few favourite baby name potentials in mind. Perhaps you know a name or two which is close to, but not quite the name you’re looking for. The Brainstormer is the perfect for these situations because of the way it allows you to visually explore the ‘close neighbours’ of a chosen name by finding associations and similarities within our database of over 12,000 baby names.

The Brainstormer is of course just in its infancy but is developing at a quick pace. Today we’re pleased to announce the addition of literal name-search capability. You can now quickly find names which match or share a prefix with your chosen name by typing it into the search field and pressing the search button. This provides a convenient jumping off point to begin exploring close neighbours of your current name potentials.

If you’ve got a name in mind that’s almost-but-not-quite what you’re looking for, try typing it into the search field and then clicking on the “sounds like” association that shows up for your chosen name.

Use the search field to jump straight to a particular name

Choosing a name for your child is a wonderful opportunity but it can be daunting. That’s why we developed Baby Name Brainstorm: an inspiring and fun way to explore your naming preferences and discover creative and unexpected name possibilities.

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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