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Bill Keaggy

Creative Director

xBlog → Collaboratory

As you probably know, XPLANE is now Dachis Group. We are integrating everything as the year closes out — xBlog included.

On the heels of our post celebrating 4,383 days online (that’s 12 internet years!), I want to let everyone know that we’ll be importing key posts into Dachis Group’s Collaboratory blog, and we’ll continue publishing our thoughts and work on visual thinking there. In fact, my first post went up yesterday and other XPLANE alumnus have started blogging there as well.

We won’t be transferring all 8,333 xBlog posts. So many of them are outdated and linkrotted. But we will make sure key posts redirect to their new homes on the Collaboratory and all other posts don’t 404.

It has been a wonderful, amazing, enlightening ride here at xBlog, from hand-coding it starting in 1999, to embracing the first release of WordPress .7 in 2003, to today — a world where blogs are more than commonplace — they are ubiquitous. I don’t know that I could give a better rundown than I did for last year’s 11th anniversary, so if you want a trip down xBlog’s memory lane you can read it here.

Blogging has been core to me and XPLANE for a long time and we’re not going to stop. I truly hope XPLANE’s fans and xBlog’s readers will continue to follow our work as Dachis Group. We’ll still be doing that visual thinking thing, just as we have been for all these years, only now we’ll be bringing to it many more people and businesses.

So on behalf of xBlog… so long, and thanks for all the links.

See you at the Collaboratory.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 19, 2011

4383 days ago…

…on November 7, 1999, xBlog launched publicly as the world’s first visual thinking weblog.

Still going (but changes are coming).

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, November 7th, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Archived in XPLANE news | comments (1)



Xylem: Let’s Solve Water

Here’s a new video Dachis Group made for for Xylem:

The demand for water will increase 5 times by 2050 but the amount of fresh drinkable water on Earth always stays the same. Xylem finds ways to efficiently save, protect and control water. It’s what we do every day. It’s why we share a goal of solving the world’s water challenges…one drop at a time.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Archived in Food & drink, Movies & motion, Sustainability, XPLANE news | comments (1)



What does a socially optimized business look like?

Today we are happy to publish a new Dachis Group XPLANATiON about Social Business.

What’s a Social Business? It’s a business alive with energy and big ideas. It’s collaborative, authentic, customer-centric, trusted, open and real-time.


Click to download the PDF.

Read more »

Meet the Social Business Index

Noise.

The web’s full of it. And social has dramatically increased it because so much can be said so quickly and so easily, from anywhere, by almost anyone. But social connects us — and a lot of us think of it as a purely personal experience. Friend to friend, person to person, fame to fan, etc. As individuals we struggle to make sense of it all as we juggle Twitter, Facebook and Flickr accounts, friends, contacts, comments and feeds.

Read more »

10 key tips for making movies in Keynote

Our earlier post on making informational videos in Keynote generated some questions, so I’ve rounded up a few tips.


A Keynote video we made for Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School.

1. On goals and purpose
Over the last few years we’ve found that in some cases, a Keynote-authored video is what you might call the “good enough” solution. Full animation can be complicated, expensive and time-consuming. Don’t get me wrong — we love it, it’s beautiful, but it’s not always needed. Keynote lets you create and edit presentations, make things move, is ridiculously easy to learn and exports to Quicktime, including easy exports for iPhone. That’s the “good enough” part — but of course technology isn’t all you need. You better have a good story and visuals too.

Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, August 11th, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Archived in Movies & motion, Presentations, Software & technology | comments (6)



Bring history to life with visual thinking

This is a guest post by Jeff Manuel, Assistant Professor of History at SIUE.

As a history professor, I work with words. Pages and pages of them, in fact. Words to write, words to read, words to speak. I use pictures and images too, but they usually play second fiddle to the words. So it was challenging and humbling to visit XPLANE | Dachis Group for a recent Visual Thinking School (VTS) because it forced me to think deeply about using visual thinking to communicate history. It was also enlightening, as I came away convinced that history instructors should incorporate more visual thinking tools into our classrooms.


We started by creating empathy maps for students and teachers to help us get into their heads regarding what they’re seeing, hearing, thinking and doing while in class.

Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Archived in History, Learning, Presentations, Sketching & illustration, Visual thinking, Visual Thinking School, XPLANE news | comments (2)



Behind the scenes: The 2.0 Adoption Council salary survey graphic

We take a lot of complicated issues, ideas, initiatives, products, plans and processes and visualize them so that people can better understand their world.

When we started back in the 1990s, we designed a lot of charts. Now we help businesses redesign — and communicate those changes to all involved. We’ve been pretty busy because business is changing pretty quickly. And in big ways. As we say at Dachis Group

Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds, but businesses are not keeping pace. When these emerging trends work together, they call for a new kind of business — one that is distributed, collaborative, agile and better positioned to succeed.

The 2.0 Adoption Council (also part of Dachis Group) recently completed a survey of its members and we worked with them to represent the results in a meaningful and interesting way. The survey was purposefully simple, but highlights some key changes happening in social business. It was just two questions: What department do you work in and what’s your salary? Here’s what was learned… Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Archived in Business issues, Infodesign & graphics, Social business, XPLANE news | comments (0)



GTD via R-E-P-E-A-T

Speaking of music

Although I always say I very much need music to do creative work, it’s scary how many times I catch myself, headphones on, cranking away… even though the music stopped playing an hour ago.

That’s because for the most part I am an album purist — I like to listen to every song in the order the band chose. But sometimes I really need to crank on a project — so I put one amazing song on repeat and get into the zone. Here’s what have turned out to be my top get-things-done tracks (each of these show hundreds of listen in my iTunes):

  1. ‘Rifles’ by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
  2. ‘Snowden’ by Doves
  3. ‘In Mind’ by Do Make Say Think
  4. ‘Duress’ by Swervedriver
  5. ‘Chemical Wire’ by fIREHOSE
  6. ‘All Her Favorite Fruit (Orchestral)’ by Camper Van Beethoven

Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, March 28th, 2011 at 7:51 am
Archived in Creativity, Music & sound | comments (1)



SXSWi 2011 sketchnotes

Wow. Visual thinking practically took center stage this year at SXSWi. Ogilvy hired visual note-takers, graphic facilitators and artists to capture many of the talks, panels and workshops during five days of interactive sessions. I too made lots of notes, sketches, scribbles and scratches and am cleaning them up and boiling them down into my own sloppy style of sketchnotes. Here are the first two:

Panel: Design Across Disciplines
SXSW 2011 - Design Across Disciplines

Read more »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
Archived in Sketching & illustration | comments (3)



Kronos video

Sample visual
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.

Azure poster

Sample visual
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.

Tweets & Flickrs