According to whois, I registered nerdmatic.com on October 31, 2003. It was created after a friend suggested spinning my blog off of my portfolio site because what I was writing didn’t relate to my then career aspirations. About a decade later, I’ve decided to re-launch nerdmatic, start writing longer pieces, and achieve the not-so-lofty goal of exploring an idea more thoughtfully than I do in a tweet or Facebook post.
In addition to setting the goal of thoughtful idea exploration, I’m explicitly not setting a goal for audience growth. When I ran Show Us Your Clips, traffic and growth became subconscious drivers. SUYC started out as a fun way to share videos with my friends and, somewhere along the line, I got distracted by numbers. The numbers and rush from spikes in traffic were great, but grinding out content, even though it was content I loved, became an unpleasant routine. As such, instead of SUYC’s pace of 15 posts/week, nerdmatic will be updated as time permits. If an audience develops, fantastic! If not, I’ll have an archive of things I thought were cool enough to write more than 140 characters about.
Because I don’t want this post to be an entirely self-indulgent trip down memory lane and declaration of “Hey! I’m restarting my blog!”, I’ve included two of my favorite videos. Beyond being some of the greatest pieces of creative/professional/design advice I have ever heard, they’re interesting because they’re different visual interpretations of the same exact audio (fun fact: the one below inspired the creation of the one above).
Between the two, the latter feels more effective because the kinetic typography aids in absorbing the message. The former has fun and clever visuals and, while they’re great, I find myself paying more attention to them than I do the advice. What do you think? Which one do you prefer?