guydavis/babynamemap

A Rails mashup with Google Maps of popular baby name statistics from around the world.

Hi, my name is Guy Davis and I built the Baby Name Map.  You're probably wondering why, so here's the story...

As a father-to-be, I went looking for help on baby naming. While there were lots of sites that provide lists of names, none of them did a good job of showing the popularity of names around the world.  

I was looking for a name for my first child which was not too popular and also not too rare.  In the case of common names, I didn't want my child to be one of the many children named Jacob or Emily in their Grade 1 class.  On the other hand, I didn't want them to be teased for having a really rare name like Moon Unit, Pilot Inspektor.

The Baby Name Map currently has over 100,000 unique 
names from 14 different countries. I hope you find the site as useful as my wife, Alison, and I have in our search for the perfect baby name. Update: My sons Gavin and Connor were born in 2008 and 2010 respectively.

The app was built on Ruby on Rails (1.5 at the time) and MySQL.  The entire project is licensed under the GPL.