Before my daughter was born, I developed a serious obsession with baby names, and in particular the psychology and social dynamics of naming. I learned from the Baby Name Wizard that names follow a clear fashion cycle, meaning that certain names reach peak popularity in a given decade (Donna or Randy in the 60s, Jennifer or Brad in the 70s, Monica or Chad in the 80s, etc.), and that you can typically expect names to come back into style every 100 years or so, because children are not usually named after living relatives.

Freakanomics adds another twist- that there’s a predictable movement of names through social classes, so that today’s quirky coastal elite Milo or Violet is tomorrow’s populist Eva or Jack.
The Web is great place for the name-obsessed to congregate, particularly when you realize how infrequently a typical woman (and this world seems to be populated largely by women) have the opportunity to name a child.

Each post on name expert Laura Wattenberg’s blog regularly receives more than a hundred comments.
Now in a Semantic Web twist, Laura has teamed up with some hard-core complexity science consultants to offer, what else, a predictive tool for baby names. Nymbler applies a complex predictive algorithm (think the Netflix or Amazon recommendation engine) to suggest clusters of related names.

Adding artificial intelligence to naming is both both comforting (no more reading through 100,000+ Baby Names!) and disturbing, because as a society we like to think of a name as something unique and
very much self-directed.  Does this start to take the magic out of it?

Misha Cornes