Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com
Hobie Swan started off the morning with an extended demo on MindManager, a brainstorming tool that makes use of MindMaps. Although Hobie concentrated on the software, there's a lot of interesting information out there about how to approach creative activities using MindMaps. As an aside, the concept grew out of Tony Buzan's work and he's got a great book on the topic The Mind Map Book. We often use MindMaps when developing the material for the Head First series.
MindManger looks like a solid application for MindMapping, including some fairly sophisticated integration that I haven't seen in other similar applications (including exporting to MS Project, XML, etc.). It also has some RSS support built in, which seems interesting, but I'm not quite sure how that would be used in practice. While I think the demo could have introduced the topic more generally, it is nice to see a presentation on the subject.
The highlight of the morning (if not the entire show) was Julie Leung's talk. Julie narrated a sequence of pictures and simple text that wove together a personal story of life, family, kids, love and death and its relation to personal expression and blogging. If you have the chance to see this talk at another conference, see it. I won't try to do this talk justice with a summary, but it is one of the best I've seen in a long time and brings us all back to why we ultimately create all this technology.
Julie's talk was followed by a panel session on the RSS of tomorrow. On the panel: Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Scott Rafer (Feeders), Bob Wyman (PubSub) on Tomorrow's RSS. This session might be relabeled RSS & advertising - it included a fair amount of debate on the ad model (reminscent of early web debates on the same topic). The consensus came down on the side that advertising via RSS is still in the expermental mode, and expressing itself in a few ways:
- Explicit advertising in feeds.
- Publish excerpts that tease readers back to your site (where conventional advertising kicks in).
- Publish full content as a means of advertising expertise, etc.
Some discussion was also spent on RSS specifications, including ATOM vs RSS as well as discussion of how to publish your own feeds (publish all the formats you can? or keep it simple?). After much discussion Dave Winer jumped in and invoked the "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive" mantra. On ATOM vs RSS, most agreed RSS will be with us forever, but ATOM may allow some publishers to do things they can't currently do with RSS.
Categories
Web
Comments (4)
Read More Entries by Eric Freeman.
ConceptDraw MINDMAP
The latest version of this polished mind mapping software adds the large set of task-specific templates designed to help professional and individual users to easily map ideas and information. I really liked ConceptDraw MindMap
http://www.conceptdraw.com
Mac
This is just speculation, but MindJet's Careers page mentions "Mac" a few times, which is encouraging.
Re: MindManager at Gnomedex
Hey Hobie, as I said in the post, we use MindMaps in the Head First series and I've used (or rather, tried to) a number of tools in that work and over the years (including tools like Inspiration). I must say, from the demo MindManager looks like it takes things to a new level of sophistication.
My comment was merely that I don't think many people know that much about MindMaps and have never used them. That said, to your point, I think you got the audience VERY engaged, so your technique worked very well and perhaps that is more important than a more general discussion.
I do have one question for you... can we have a Mac version? Please, pretty please?
MindManager at Gnomedex
Hi Eric,
I chose to get the audience engaged in a brainstorming session to try to show how mind mapping supports the randomness and speed of group thinking. Maybe it was a little too MindManager focused. But I thought it would be interesting the the Gnomedex audience to see how you can use our map interface to take information out of its many siloes and put it all together in one thinking space. There really aren't many interfaces where you can combine web search results, RSS feeds, emails, and links to documents/audio/video/image files with your thoughts and ideas about all of that information--and then start assigning tasks and action based on those thoughts. Anyone who is interested in the practical applications of MindMapping can go to Mindjet's case studies page. I gave a couple of quick references in my presentation of how companies use our mapping software to manage various projects. YOu can find more practical examples in our case studies.
Thanks very much for mentioning my presentation.
Hobie Swan