Best visitor reaction so far...

I came across this reaction to the Baby Name Map in the forums at BabyZone:

This, my friends, is the bomb-diggity!

Thanks to Holly Rae for her great review which brought many new visitors to the map.

Mentioned on Mapperz - Mapping News Blog

Thanks to Mapperz for their article on the Baby Name Map highlighting the recent update and latest enhancements. Their suggestion to consider the Google Charts API for the charts showing name popularity is an interesting one. I've briefly looked at the Charts API before, but so far the Gruff library has worked well and tied in nicely with Ruby on Rails page caching strategies. I will have to take a deeper look at the Google API though in the future as it does look pretty good. My guess is that Google Charts also has a pretty decent caching strategy for their images. :)

TechCrunch mention

Thanks to Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch for his mention of the Baby Name Map in an article on Nymbler. I am also a big fan of the Nymbler site which is proving helpful in my own search for great baby names.

However, Nymbler and many other baby name sites don't do a good job of showing the popularity of baby names in your region and around the world, both now and in the past. Especially for those of us not residing in the US, I'd like to think the Baby Name Map is a useful tool. Let me know what you think as I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve the site.

Mashup of the Day!

The Baby Name Map was Mashup of the Day yesterday at Programmable Web. This site tracks interesting Web 2.0 applications. Thanks for the mention!

LifeHacker article

A big thanks to Gina Trapani at LifeHacker for mentioning the Baby Name Map. The site took a pounding in the morning as thousands of visitors checked out the map. I had to quickly implement some improved caching to let the site keep pace with all the visitors.

Baby Names Garden article

Thanks to Neil from the Baby Names Garden blog for posting about the Baby Name Map.

Google Maps Mania article

Thanks to Mike Pegg from Google Maps Mania for mentioning the Baby Name Map on his great blog covering all things cool in the world of Google Maps. This was the first serious press for the site, introducing over 800 visitors to the Baby Name Map after reading Mike's article.