Author: Thomas Vander Wal

Responsive Design is Part of the Question not the Answer

Jan 8, 2014

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Design, Devices, Information Architecture, Mobile, User Experience, Web/Tech

Today’s New York Times redesign has lit up Twitter and other services with many saying “… but, it isn’t responsive”. I quickly recalibrated who knows mobile design / development and who is still learning. Responsive design has become the mantra the zombies repeat for mobile. Responsive is one of the five options for mobile and…
Alexander Howard Interview with Christopher (moot) Poole from October 2011 Transcript

Dec 12, 2013

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Community, Identity, Social Software, sxd

The video interview is at YouTube Christopher Poole Interviewed at Web 2.0 Summit 2011 4Chan is 8 years old and Christopher founded it when he was 15 years old. Transcript of the core conversation: Alex Howard: … What have you learned along the way? Christopher Poole: I think that I’ve learned more about what not…
Resonance in Sound and Design

May 31, 2013

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Thomas Vander Wal

in Design, Devices, Interface, User Experience, Weblogs

Resonance: The quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating: the resonance of his voice. The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions: the concepts lose their emotional resonance. Listening to the lovely and haunting Dead Already from the American Beauty soundtrack by Thomas Newman in high quality recording (lossless) and…
Everynow

May 26, 2013

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Thomas Vander Wal

in Devices, Information Architecture, Interface, Reference, Technology, Ubiquitous Computing, User Experience

We are living in a time where there are not only many concurrent realities existing at once, but our understanding of “Now” is perhaps broader and more broken than most any time since the Middle Ages started sprouting into the Renaissance. This is nowhere more prevalent in our understanding of the future, particularly the near…
Broken Decade Precedes It Works Decade

Apr 28, 2013

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Thomas Vander Wal

in Enterprise, Mobile, Personal InfoCloud, Portability, User Experience

I had long forgotten this Carl Steadman response to Michael Sippy’s “Just One Question – What do you want for Christmas”, but the response from 1997 is fantastic and frames the 1990s as the broken decade. (I’ll wait for you to go read it) I’m not so sure that Carl’s broken decade got better in…
How to Tame the Daily Feeds

Mar 16, 2013

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in KM World, Personal InfoCloud, PKM

Link to original column: Personal KM: How to tame the daily feeds Original post date: July 5, 2011 [Editor’s Note: Thomas Vander Wal has spent many years as an infovore, gathering, reading, annotating and reusing the volumes of information he has run across. Over the years, he has searched for the ever-elusive one perfect solution,…
Coming Out of Hiatus

Mar 16, 2013

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Thomas Vander Wal

in Complexity Lenses, Personal InfoCloud, Social Lenses, Social Software

Things have been a bit quiet here, but many changes on this side of the screen are settling and allowing idea and writing focus. One of the things I am pulling together are my columns from KM World on Personal Knowledge Management (it unintentionally went into hiatus at the same time). One of the great…
Mistaking the Edges for the Norm

Jun 22, 2012

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Thomas Vander Wal

in Applications, Community, Social Software, sxd, Technology, User Experience, Web/Tech

One of the best lessons from social quantitative analysis in grad school (public policy) was learning to understand if you are viewing edge cases or the norm (mainstream). Humans have some common traits, but when you start to design or develop any sort of program (be it government services or social software) you start to…
Microsoft and the Plan for Yammer?

Jun 16, 2012

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Enterprise, Social Software

So, mid-day Friday the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Yammer agrees to sell to Microsoft. This doesn’t mean the deal is announced nor done, and even if that happens it isn’t over until it is over (as Yogi Berra says). There have been a lot of people asking why all of this is important and…
Microsoft and Yammer?

Jun 14, 2012

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by

Thomas Vander Wal

in Applications, Enterprise, Social Software, sxd

Yesterday’s news of the rumor that Microsoft is about to purchase Yammer surfaced and Bloomberg was able to get confirmations there were talks happening. This one seemed a little odd last evening as the rumor broke, but then the ambient signals that myself and others had been seeing with Yammer made sense in that light.…