Have you googled your baby name choice? What about purchasing your baby’s website domain name and twitter account? Before googling became a verb, finding a baby name for your little bundle of joy was limited to thumbing through books and making some telephone calls to extended relatives. The last thing you were concerned with was naming your baby after a porn star. Well cue the year 2010, with the internet infiltrating every aspect of our lives and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on a meteoric ascent, naming your baby in this digital age has become just slightly trickier.

These days parents are not only googling their child's potential first and last name to make sure that their chosen name is not associated with any unsavory stuff (adult film starts for instance, or unfortunately in my case I share the same name as convicted murderer Melissa Chapman, but I digress) but even going so far as to purchase their child's domain name. We asked a couple of parents to share the methods they’ve used in naming their newborns in this new, digital world in which we live.

Secure your baby name website

“I may be the oddball because I’m in the digerati of the web, but for my daughter, Helena James, who is two, I secured her website address and Twitter account quickly, “says BJ Cook CEO & co-founder Digital Operative Inc. “For the twins who are 24 weeks along, we did the whole baby name website search to see what ranking they were in the US since my wife didn’t want any names in the top 100. I also have my own Dad blog, so I posted names there for the boy and people ended up commenting like crazy on Facebook, voting for their favorites and adding new ones.”

Cook believes that the baby naming process is harder today since there are so many things to consider when doing research, including how popular is the name in their country? How popular is the name in their city? Who else do they know with this name? Is there anything inappropriate that they find on Google when they search for the name? And, he notes, when you start crowd sourcing or polling people on places like Facebook and Twitter, you not only get their vote, but also their two cents on other names. In a nutshell naming your baby in this digital age is an all out free for all.

Don’t forget to Google your baby name!

“We have a 21-month old and we sure did Google the names we were considering, “says Sherean Malekzadeh Allen. “We knew we wanted to name him "Hunter" which was my grandmother's maiden name and we didn't care if that was the first or middle name. We also liked the name "Bryce" but when my husband googled "Hunter Bryce," he got a LOT of porn star hits. My husband was horrified and did not want our son to be confused with a porn star later in life. (To complicate matters more, I believe it was a female porn star.) Can you imagine? His little friends looking him up online later and being so confused?”

So Allen says they ended up with Hunter Jameson Allen. Jameson because her husband's middle name is "James" and so "Jameson" is "James' son." Of course, they found out later (someone told them before they had a chance to Google it) that Jameson is an Irish whisky. But for Allen and her husband, the name still worked. They were content to take whisky over a porn star name any day.

“In some ways, the digital age makes anything related to information gathering and filtering easier, doesn’t it?” says Allen, who admits that when she and her husband met online, they both googled one another before meeting in person. “Ultimately for us, we wanted our son’s name to have some personal, sentimental meaning, but we absolutely did not want a porn star name. Life’s tough enough.”

Baby naming resources worth checking out

In addition to securing your baby’s url and researching Google for potential name conflicts  check out these great baby name generator sites.

Baby Hold:  Right here on BabyHold.com, you can peruse 30,000 baby name meanings, baby naming trends, baby names via origins and participate in forums where you can bounce ideas off of other users.

How many of me?:  With 310,033,545 people in the U.S., at HowManyofMe.com you can narrow down just how many have share the name you want for your baby.  You simply put in a first and last name and see just how many people have an identical name and ensure their child’s name is somewhat unique.

Reserve your baby’s domain name: Check out Godaddy.com to see if your baby’s name is still available to purchase. For instance, if you are thinking of naming your baby Addison Smith, you can see if www.AddisonSmith.com is available and, if it is, purchase it!

Tell us: Have you googled your potential baby name? Would the results alter your baby name choice?

More baby naming tools:

• Join the BabyHold message boards to get baby name advice from other parents
  
• Advanced baby name search: Search names by origin and meaning
• Quiz: What's your baby naming style?
• Quiz: What should you name your baby?
  

More From SheKnows Explorer

Comments (2)

Subscribe to this comment's feed