In the beginning...

I've been prodded, and cajoled, and encouraged to write a blog for sometime by a small number of people, who for various reasons seem to think, rightly or wrongly, that I may make a positive contribution of some sort in doing so. So I have finally acquiesced and here is my blog, though I have no expectations of establishing a following, and at this stage I cannot say how regularly I will post.

It will not be a personal exposé, or contain emotional outpourings, other than perhaps the occasional frustrated rant. Instead, it will cover my attempt to launch a start up in a very amateurish fashion, and technical issues that I hit in doing so.

I guess before anything else, I should start out with a note about identity. Just in case anyone attributes any of my comments or opinions to someone else, and therefore misrepresenting them. Arch is not that common a surname, but on the web, there appears to be quite a number of Andrew Arch's. Internet searches over the last decade for Andrew Arch would always come up with a number of them, here in Australia and overseas. With three of us here in Melbourne Australia.

There's the Andrew Arch who published some CSIRO papers and who always came up in the initial search engine results some 10 years ago, but who now seems to have disappeared from the search engines and apparently is some distant cousin of mine. Then there is Dr Andrew Arch of W3C, recently of Vision Australia. I don't know if we are related in any way, but I have been assured that I'm related to all the Arch's who live in the Melbourne, if not the Victorian area. However, that is a bold claim. For the last few years, this Dr Andrew Arch was the only Andrew Arch that showed up in search engines, blowing away any previous footprint that either myself or the CSIRO Andrew Arch may have had, which can only be a good thing, at least for me. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Dr Andrew Arch and the CSIRO Andrew Arch are one and the same person. Names can be very confusing, as simply not enough of an identifier. I guess I could always just contact him and find out, but nah... Mysteries are sometimes best left as mysteries, because then you can construct all sorts of fanciful stories based on what you don't know.

So I do a search just now, to see how pervasive Dr Andrew Arch still is, and what do you know. I'm beginning to pop up in Google and Yahoo, now that I have a few public profiles about the place. So I guess, to capitalise on that, it is in my personal interests to start blogging as a means of building on that profile, and perhaps even benefiting a little from some mistaken identity with our esteemed Dr Andrew Arch. Spreading the footprint of the name Andrew Arch can only be mutually beneficial, surely?

So now, I just have to work out what I want to achieve out of this blog, if anything at all. Then, what to write and at what level to convey it. I guess it would help if I identified my target audience. That would be a good first step.