While taking the Google Dev's Python course. One of the exercises used Social Security Baby Name Data. I thought it a good exercise to get said data. So here is a python web scraper to get the data and some quick ggplots to visualize changes in rankings over time. They are in the R file. There are straight forward instructions to change the appropriate variables if you want to examine the declining popularity of the nomenclature attached to your parents greatest mistake.

There are walkthrough on my site. http://notebookonthewebs.tumblr.com/post/13114811173/popular-baby-names-walk-through-part-2-graphing-the

After writing this scraper Hadley Wickham pointed me to an identical exercise in R/Ruby.(alas the first rule in coding, find some else who has solved the same problem and steal their work) It can be found here https://github.com/hadley/data-baby-names. He also has more R backflips to use(being the inventer of R blackfilps). Take a look. 

Written with:
Python 2.7
	BeautifulSoup
	mechanical

R 2.13
	ggplot2

git user: electrum Pointed out that the raw data is also available form the SSa website. Here: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html