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 So many of them are outdated and linkrotted.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

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.

Can you imagine how big brands must feel?

It’s more than overwhelming.

The brave new world of immediate social connectivity has exploded and soon it will be impossible to survive as a business without making sense of it. Because all those friends and fans and random people are talking about the businesses they love and hate.

But that’s adding to the noise, isn’t it? And it’s difficult to keep up with, impossible to control, unbelievable in scope.

Signal.

In June Dachis Group launched the Social Business Index (SBI), but unless you were a social media practitioner, a brand owner, or a social strategy owner in one of the Indexed companies, there wasn’t a lot to see.

That changes today. Dachis Group has opened up a portion of the Social Business Index to the public.

The Index is not a white paper. It’s not a 500 page report. It’s not a ‘top 10 tips on social’ blog post. It’s not a set of survey results or prognostication on trends in social.

The Social Business Index is a dynamic, living, interactive lens into real-time social performance, covering over 26,000 brands from over 20,000 companies, including over 100 million social accounts worldwide.

It’s a big deal.

While XPLANE | Dachis Group was not involved in the design of SBI (another of Jeff Dachis’s companies, Bond Art & Science, took care of that), we’re really excited about how visual the presentation of the data is.

There’s a Periodic Table-like breakdown to the high-level ranking information, and simple but clear methods for visualizing business’s community and behavior. As more data is gathered and sorted, I can’t wait to see the new ways we come up with to order and present the information.

Dive in for yourself to see what we’re talking about. Public access is now available at www.socialbusinessindex.com — and brands can register for more in-depth access to the tool.

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.

We knew we needed the look of “Iowa, Did You Know? to respect the serious tone of the content — and also create a sense of urgency. To do this, we minimized the color palette and illustrated in a simple, flat style. We found ourselves inspired by letterpress and silkscreen posters — they always seem to convey such personality and immediacy. This is true for both modern band posters and things like historic FSA and political posters.

To help strike a contrast between Iowa and the world, the Iowa scenes have an earth-toned color palette as well as a burlap texture. This makes them feel somewhat analog and vintage. Anything related to the outside world or new technologies received a brighter, cleaner color palette that is more vivid and energized. We used Thirstype’s Apex typeface to bring an academic feel and a look that meshes with IowaFuture.org’s branding.

XPLANE previously worked with Dr. McLeod and Karl Fisch on the educational “Did You Know? 2.0” video in 2007. We collaborated again in 2009, this time including The Economist, on “Did You Know? 4.0” which focused on media convergence and technology. These videos have more than 7 million views on YouTube.

The “Iowa, Did You Know” content was developed by Dr. McLeod, with all storyboarding, design, and animation by XPLANE | Dachis Group.

Tell us what you think!

Update, August 5, 2011: Here’s Scott McLeod’s blog post with more info about the piece and the series.

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.

In a ubicomp (ubiquitous computing) world, what kinds of methods, and what kinds of tools, will designers use to think through a whole new set of design problems? The environment and the context of use become much more important. Devices and services become stakeholders in the process, communicating not only with users but with other products and processes over a complex and deeply intertwingled network.

How will this change our approaches to design and change? How will it change our lives, our cities, and our social relationships?

Peter and I are embarking on a new project we’re calling Ubicomp Sketchbook to explore exactly these kinds of things. We hope you will enjoy the ride and also share your thoughts, sketches and ideas. We’ll be using the hashtag #ubicompsketchbook for our explorations.

Check out the whole set on Flickr.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.