Dolores Labs a provider of crowdsourcing services used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to show thousands of random color to people and asked what they would call them:

This study is basically the same design as the famous World Color Survey, where anthropologists showed color patches to speakers of many different languages and asked for names, to test the universality of language. Of course, we have mostly native English speakers. However, we can get much more data. (The above picture and links use only a small percentage of all the colors and names we collected.) There’s tons more that can be done. Want to make a better visualizer? Statistical analysis of colors to name terms? Let us know and we should be able to get this data set online

The results are interesting to view through the applet they built to display the color labels. In a follow-up post, Brendan of Dolores Labs provides access to the raw data and some notes on how he initially processed the sample color patches.

While the experiment might not be up to academic standards, it does present an interesting way to collect a lot of data quickly on the subjective naming of colors.