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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 So many of them are outdated and linkrotted.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

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Friday, November 18th, 2011 at 11:16 am
Also published in Business of design, Communications, Infodesign & graphics, Sketching & illustration, Visual thinking, Visual Thinking School, Weblogs, XPLANE news | comments (1)


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 »

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011 at 9:02 am
Also published in Business issues, Customers, Data visualization, Marketing & branding, Sales, Social business, Software & technology, XPLANE news | comments (0)


Did you know there’s a new ‘Did You Know?’ video?

Once again XPLANE | Dachis Group has teamed up with Dr. Scott McLeod of Iowa State University to create a thought-provoking video. The brand-new “Iowa, Did You Know?” kicked off the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday morning. This DYK video contrasts the world’s exponential growth in technology and learning with Iowa’s struggles to best prepare K-12 students for this new future.

Intended as a forceful wake-up call for Iowa educators, the video stresses the importance of an educational approach that moves away from “low-level mental work” and towards stronger development in critical thinking and problem solving.

Read more »

Posted by W. Scott Matthews on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Also published in History, Leadership, Learning, Mobile, Movies & motion, Software & technology, XPLANE news | comments (0)


The Ubicomp Sketchbook

In a recent post titled Ubiquitous Service Design, Peter Morville raised some interesting questions about how we might design for a world where everything is, or potentially can be — smart. A world where your refrigerator knows what you had for lunch and when the lettuce will be out of date. A world where your car gives you suggestions for getting better gas mileage or tells you a better way to get where you’re going.
Read more »

Posted by Dave Gray on Thursday, October 21st, 2010 at 11:47 am
Also published in Product design, Sketching & illustration, Software & technology | comments (0)


Online Database of Social Media Policies

Social Media Governance is a book that helps organizations find the right balance of empowerment and accountability in their social media efforts. It will be released in September 2009.

They’ve created a database of social media policies from dozens of companies, governments, non-profits.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Also published in Meetings & office culture, Social business | comments (0)


Did You Know? 4.0

XPLANE is happy to present Did You Know? 4.0 — another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence and technology, and was developed in partnership with The Economist.

As Garr Reynolds mentions over at Presentation Zen this morning, yes, this project was created with “off-the-shelf slideware” (Keynote and GarageBand, actually, along with Photoshop and Illustrator). Content by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Design and development by XPLANE.

For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit The Economist’s Media Convergence conference site at mediaconvergence.economist.com, or stop by shifthappens.wikispaces.com for all things Did You Know.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Also published in Communications, Graphic design, History, Infodesign & graphics, Journalism, Marketing & branding, Mobile, Old media, Politics, Privacy & security, Social business, Software & technology, Visual thinking, XPLANE news | comments (4)


The Building Blocks of Social Media for Business

Here’s some good perspective from Chris Brogan:

Where do you start? That’s the question I get often when I’m asked how to help a company market using social media tools. The people who contact me are smart. They tell me things like, “Yeah, they said we should start with a blog, and we said, ‘like the blog we already have?’” But what comes next is rarely a simple choice. I wanted to take you through some thoughts on what the basic building blocks of social media might be for a business (in the context of marketing, but then stretching a bit further out).

Remember, roadmaps don’t work really well until you have a solid goal or destination in mind. None of this matters unless it feels right to you, regardless of my advice. You know your company’s boundaries. You know what your comfort levels are. Proceed at your organizational pace.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 9:12 am
Also published in Marketing & branding, Social business | comments (0)


Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman

Personas is pretty fun to watch. Wish you could do something with it, like click through to the sources.

Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab… It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person — to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
Also published in Art & architecture, Searching | comments (1)


25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers

As someone notes in the comments: “As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Somehow seeing things with a picture adds a whole new dimension.”

Infographics can be a great way to quickly reference information.

Instead of pouring over figures and long reports to decipher data, an infographic can immediately make apparent exactly what a dataset actually means…

Some are incredibly practical, some provide information that might be of interest to designers and some just present data that might be interesting to those who design websites all day.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Also published in Infodesign & graphics, Web design & dev | comments (0)


10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business

Let’s make sure to revisit this in 2 1/2 years… :-)

24/7 Wall St. has come up with 10 ways in which Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two to three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the ways that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of how companies will use Twitter in the future.

Posted by Bill Keaggy on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Also published in Business issues, Social business | comments (0)


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