I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to tell you what Ignorantium is really all about. I’ve rewritten this page a half dozen times since I redid the site and I still think it’s inadequate.

Let me start at the beginning. Ignorantium came about several years ago as a “traditional” personal web site for me to record my opinions while also trying to subtly impress readers, colleagues and potential clients with my expertise. Google the terms “marketing consultant” or “blah blah expert” and you’ll come up with a dozen examples of what I had built–right down to the cheesy headshot of me looking all serious and experty.

Then a couple of things happened…

First, I quickly grew bored with recording personal anecdotes and opinions, because I just as quickly realized how dull my personal anecdotes and opinions can be. They’re personal, and as such, have a context that sometimes takes too long to share to make them interesting.

Second, I realized that opinions are pretty common in the marketing world, so simply having them, and posting them on a personal web site, doesn’t really do anything. It just lowers the signal-to-noise ratio in the marketing world. My site and all those personal anecdotes and opinions were being drowned out by all of the noise coming from the other marketing experty sites.

Besides, I have something that most of the marketing “gurus” don’t seem to have: a really geeky love for the underlying technology that makes everything, not just marketing, work. I have an abiding affection for geek “culture.” I even went back to school a few years ago to get my master’s in technology management because I felt like so many marketing geniuses were so interested in espousing their views on brand attachment that they missed out on the fact that there’s a lot of really cool stuff going on around them. It seemed a shame.

So I decided to make Ignorantium a place to discuss that stuff, or more specifically, how individuals, businesses, governments, etc. are attempting to understand and harness technology and make it work. I took out the cheesy headshot and stripped it down to what I consider to be a cool layout. There’s nothing extraneous now, so hopefully the content can really come through. (There will probably still be a personal anecdote or two, and opinions will be distributed liberally, but you don’t have to look at me anymore.)

You may be asking (or not) just what does “ignorantium” mean? Well, it’s actually a misspelling. The actual spelling is “ignorantiam.” The word is taken from the logical fallacy called “argumentum ad ignorantiam” which means literally “argument from ignorance.” The fallacy takes the form of an argument that holds a conclusion to be true if it has not been proven false or false if it has not been proven true. Besides, I just like the word. It sounds like a Roman village buried by a volcano or the atom responsible for stupidity.

So that’s the broad overview. I will continue to add things to this site as I get worked up. You can reach out to me at host <atsign> ignorantium.com if you want. I try to reply to everyone.

Cheers!

James

Your Host

Come back often….