David Coursey has a piece this week about MindJet’s Mind Manager software that caught my eye. I like David’s stuff a lot — like the Baby Bear he’s usually thinking about stuff that’s in the “just right” place for me, not too far out there in rocket-science exotic whacko new-idea land, but not talking about stuff that I’ve looked at six months ago and already evaluated.
read on for more observations about mind-mapping software and the community-collaboration connection…
I’ve been a Powerpoint user since Version 1 — yep, I liked it better than Harvard Graphics, which was it’s big competitor way back then — that’s how long I’ve been using it.
In the last few years people have pointed out that Powerpoint can make you dumb. David points to Edward Tufte’s essay “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint” as a good example — and I agree with most of the points that Edward makes. However, I’m convinced that you can dodge those bullets (nyuck nyuck, so to speak) and do good thinking/persuading with the tool if you are careful.
That said, Powerpoint is extremely rigid in certain ways, which makes it a poor choice in a lot of situations. I spend a lot of time brainstorming with folks and have been addicted to white boards for years. One problem with white boards is writing the dang stuff down before erasing and moving on to the next conversation — to that end, I carry a little Casio camera at all times, and it’s taken many whiteboard photos in its day. But what a hassle — and besides, you can’t make connections between the white board stuff you just erased now can you. After all, it’s erased…
Enter this mind-mapping software — which has been around for ages and has always kinda bugged me (just like it kinda bugged David). But the newest version is starting to get me interested in taking another look. Partly because it’s got a cleaner look and feel, but mostly because of the arrival of RSS-feed integration. Once again, this gives me a “something there that’s interesting for community building, collaborative type people even if I don’t exactly know what it is” tingle.
I’m gonna go get me a copy of that stuff and mess around with it — I think that a jointly maintained map, with a bunch of XML/RSS-feed connections on it, pushed out over the Web? or through Groove? or SharePoint? offers a new way for people to work and play together on the ‘net. Looks like fun to me…