Naming something is an act of creation that can seem as difficult as bringing the creation into existence itself, yet is surprisingly important for team identity, branding, and focus. As a project leader, I've had many opportunities to name projects. One of my favorite choices was Swiftsure, a company project I once christened because it spoke to me about getting to the goal - faster and cheaper - reliably; since this was the point of that effort, and a balance of attributes that's hard to get right, it was a great choice. That name also has lots of ties to where I live, including a great sailboat race and a lightship (a mobile lighthouse, though it sounds more like something out of Star Trek).

That choice satisfied things I think are important when considering such names - tthey should be memorable, meaningful, acceptable to the team, and useable for branding and team identity. I prefer single word names, though I like to stay away from acronyms.

So when I decided to start a blogging site, I naturally needed to come up with a name for the site, and had these guidelines in mind. I have had several other domain names for different purposes in the past, including a family site, and a business named praecedo, which I liked because of it's latin origins and meanings. Unfortunately, no one else could properly pronounce it (heck, half the time I couldn't, either!), and I have enough problems with that with my own name.

As my site was to be for personal blogging, in the spirit of Tom Peter's Re-imagine!, and his suggestions on Personal Branding, I wanted something relevant to that purpose. Of course, one is obviously constrained by the availability of domain names, and most real one-word names have already been purchased by one of several companys, whose business model consists of beating me to the punch. Thus, most names I was interested in would only be available if I dropped my goal of ".com", or paid a lot of money to get the rights to a name. So instead, I decided to roll my own.

 I started with the word 'blogging', chopped off the b, and added the "Pf' that's at the front end of my name to that stem. I did that in the spirit of jokes in my Pfamily, which (at least occasionally, and true to our Germanic roots), pronounces that 'P' very softly, so that it is generally not discernable except to the practiced ear. Thus, in the proper pronunciation of this web site, the "P" is also to be silent, even though it is there.

This, of course, creates a problem. I need to clearly delineate myself from flogging. I have no interest in those origins, be they penal colonies, slavery, or eroticism, and would prefer to stay as far away from such topics as possible. In practice, I do intend to use this soapbox to pflog technology - it's creation, direction, immaturity, and challenges. As a developer, user, and victim of technology, I must warn the reader that this journey can be fraught with peril, and it's never clear whether I'm writing a comedy or tragedy; indeed, I suspect usually, it's far too much of both. So thus a name, a web site, and a mission is established.

In early Chinese philosophy, there is a saying that the name of a thing is separate from the thing itself. Similarly, the name of this site should not give a reader a sense of everything you might find here. The outlines I've provided above are hints, but I won't treat them as hard constraints. If I choose to blog on football, rather than technology - well, it's only a name!