It’s a new year and lots of new stuff has grabbed my attention. Ignorantium, as is often the case, has received the short end of the stick. (Blogger’s note: I have never understood that saying. What stick? A stick is a stick. It has two ends. One end ends where the other end begins. How can one end be any shorter or longer than the other end? It makes no sense.) And while it’s understandable (unlike that saying), it’s not acceptable. I should blog more and I know it. So I promise I will. (You: “Liar.” Me: “Shut up.”)

But in case I don’t post here, and to satisfy that yen you seem to have for my prose, you can head over to a new blog: MobilePaymentsToday.com. I am the new editor over there. (In case I’m too subtle: That’s the announcement.) I’m looking forward to loading it up with payment stuff. It’s a great publication with a lot of smart people around. It’s also covering a very interesting part of the technology world: the nexus of mobile, payments, commerce, technology. It’s an awesome gig and I just used the word “nexus.” Life is good.

With all that going on, I will keep to my promise and do semi-regular postings. Give me a hard time if I don’t.

The other great thing about Sendible is that it’s just not very expensive. I’ve now worked with literally dozens of CMS, social media and email platforms, and a lot of them are just stupidly over-priced for the level of performance they deliver. I don’t care if your company has offices all over the world, if all your doing is updating my Twitter feed or sending out emails, I don’t need to pay you $10,000 a month. Ever.

I’ll keep working with this little tool and let you know if the whizbots and doohickeys really whiz and doo. (Rethinking that metaphor.) For now, consider me impressed.

Note: This update has been lovingly crafted and placed into the tender care of Sendible. If it craps out, expect a “Sendible is poo” post shortly.

As you can see, posts are coming more frequently these days on Ignorantium. Posts had started to turn into 1000 word slogs for readers. That’s too long for a reader to read and a writer to write with any regularity, not to mention too hard to do and retain some level of quality. The result was large periods of time with no posts. Blogs die when they’re not fed and I didn’t want that to happen to Ignorantium. So instead, I went back to the way I did things a long time ago with quicker posts done more frequently. I may still do a longer piece every once in a while, but for now I’m sticking to the stuff that made me like doing this blog in the first place: product and site reviews, interesting tech bits I run across and opinion pieces aimed at trends in marketing, tech and social media. From the nice responses I’ve gotten, and the nice spike in traffic, apparently people are happier with this format as well. I’ll keep at it.

Expect to see more product reviews next week. The social media world is moving so quickly and spawning all sorts of interesting offerings that allow people to tag, file and connect with friends and strangers alike. As I run across interesting sites and tools I’ll throw up reviews. Also starting sometime next week I’m going to pick a day (probably Wednesdays) where I provide a ton of links to odd things and burgeoning web memes. If you’ve got something you think I might want to include, feel free to send me an email (host atsign ignorantium.com) or through Twitter @jameswester. (Until I get the purpose of @ignorantium figured out, replies and DMs to that account might go unnoticed.)

And finally, my picture today is from Wikipedia’s daily featured article. It’s a randomly chosen picture from my morning surfing, but it kind of fits in with today’s theme of where this blog is going. (The title of today’s post is taken from signs and warnings to riders of the London Underground to “mind the gap” between the platform edge and the train door. In this case, it means mind the gaps between blog posts. I thought that was moderately clever.)

Hope you have a great weekend. See you next week.

photo credit: Wikipedia

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Twitter is a great tool and a valuable channel worth using and watching. But the fact that it’s a private platform being controlled by private interests, and not open-source being run by and for the good of all users, means I am becoming more and more leery of it as it grows. I’m not saying that the folks at Twitter are up to any nefarious plots, but sooner or later they will assert some control somewhere–a decision here or there to limit or eliminate a heretofore free feature–and it is going to make someone unhappy. Or more likely, it’s going to make lots of someones unhappy. It will probably be short-sighted third-party developers and those who depend upon Twitter for their livelihood who get burned, but the burning sensation will also extend to those who depend on those developers as well, i.e. their customers. I do my best to avoid burning sensations.

And one more thing: You may notice the tone of this blog becoming a little more confrontational. I’m not being provocative for the sake of angering anyone, but I think some of my posts have been bland for the sake of being likable. That’s not the way good ideas come about. So I suspect that my opinions may not always be in line with the current shared wisdom. Please feel free to let me know what you think. I hate arguing for the sake of arguing, but I also think that due to the easy ability to resend, retweet and repackage opinions and posts, ‘conventional wisdom’ becomes conventional a lot sooner than it used to. We’re building some big structures these days with quick-setting stupidity, so to speak. That’s too bad. So I intend to look at that wisdom a little closer, not to be intentionally provocative (that’s the realm of gadflies and pop stars), but to see if I can shake loose some of the aggregate before it becomes permanent. (That’s a cement metaphor and it’s brilliant.) If you disagree with me, let me know. Your comments, even the disagreeable ones, will be cherished. I promise.

First, we have the Wikipedia entry for Epping. In it we learn that Epping is a nice suburb of London. We also learn this little nugget about the Epping train station (It’s where the Central Line terminates, in case you wanted to know):

“The station has a car park with 508 spaces and is the second largest car park on the London Underground network, a toilet, a ticket machine, a pay phone as well as seats for sitting outside of the station.“ (I’ve left the original links in because you might want to know more about ticket machines and pay phones.)

I don’t know about you, but the fact that someone loves the Epping train station enough to comment on the number of parking spaces, and note it is the second largest car park on the London Underground, is charming. I also note with some real surprise that there is a toilet there. As a denizen of New York for many years, I know working toilets in train stations are very, very rare. (And just to show I’m not mocking the person who wrote that Wiki entry, I say with some pride that my Subway station in Manhattan at 190th on the A line had the deepest station in the entire NYC Subway system. I too am a train geek.)

Second, a link to Rod Stewart. Mr Stewart is a current resident of Epping. There’s a list on the Wikipedia entry of famous Eppingians, but some on the list may have just passed through Epping. Rod Stewart was the most notable on the list who actually lives there. (Just in case, if Mr Stewart is my reader in Epping, thanks for visiting. I have a song of yours on my playlist for my morning run, if you care.)

Here’s a link to the site of Eleanor Laing, the Member of Parliament (MP to we Anglophiles) for Epping Forest. She seems like a fine person, though she does appear to have only one green jacket. (PR tip to Ms Laing: If you’re going to do a series of photo ops on the same day, bring a change of jackets. Alternatively, women can wear something plain like a black jacket and then accessorize with something notable like a chunky necklace that can be switched out between photo ops. That’s all that will catch the eye and no one will notice you’re wearing the same clothes.) That’s all I can really add there. As Anglophilic as I am, I haven’t a clue about the English parliamentary system. Apparently Ms. Laing is also a “Shadow Minister” which sounds cool but slightly evil. I put British governance on the list of English things I just don’t undertand along with cricket and steak and kidney pie.

For my non-Epping readers, if you ever wish to visit Epping, here is the link to a travel and tourism site featuring Epping. If you visit, send me pics.

And to my Epping reader, if you are not Rod Stewart : Please send me a comment or a note. I’d love to know your opinions of the site. Cheers to you, my friend! Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks to non-Eppingians for stopping by as well.