Whilst searching for something or other recently I cam across the UK government's statisitcs on baby names. It seems the Office of National Statistics provide an annual snapshot of names given to babies in England and Wales. Obviously having helped name a couple of children myself the first thing I did was look up our two. I was slightly suprised to find our oldest's name was a consant top 10 performer, having thought it was pretty random in a traditional way at the time. Our other one's name is quite a way down the list, and I suspect would have been further down still if a certain celebrity hadn't copied us!
Whilst having the data in a spreadsheet is better than nothing I thought it could be put into much better use on a website with crosslinking to regions, origins and trends. So I built my very own UK baby names website. I realise this probably wasn't the most original idea in the world, but I liked the dataset and thought I might try to drill down a little more than the other sites...