Archive for October, 2008

Hand-drawn mindmaps face-off: Part 3 New faces

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

I didn’t keep my promise to post the results of the hand-drawn mindmappers face-off on 6th October.  Sorry you were kept waiting with bated breath<grin>, but there’s a reason: I couldn’t find examples of the work of all the newly recommended mappers.  I’m still short of one (Nick Duffill’s recommendation, Elaine Collier, a former mindmapping world champion no less) but I feel I can’t hold this post up any more. Maybe I’ll be able to locate examples of Elaine’s work later.  [Update: I should have been looking for "Colliar".  Thanks to Paul Foreman for putting me right.  Will post about her work later.]

As you may have seen, I did publish the results of the survey yesterday. 

“New faces” in the title here means “new to the face-off”.  The great hand-drawn mindmappers now added to my earlier list are no Johnny-come-lately artists.  

Clicking on any of these images takes you to the original page.

Nancy Margulies - her works - she calls them Mindscapes - are wonderful. I omitted her from the original list only because I couldn’t remember how to spell her name and therefore find her site. If you’re not familiar with her work, take a look at her Mindscapes site.  If your artistry and insight is, unfortunately, anything like mine, weep quietly as you do so.

           
          

Roberta Buzzacchino - Roberta’s work is in Italian - she works in public administration and has a legal background.

Alberto Martinez - is an engineer-turned-manager and an active mapper whose work has the simplicity and clean appearance of good business mapping.
    

Nancy White - Nancy has pages of work on flickr.com. Not all are mind maps.  She uses visual communication in her work as a presenter, writer, teacher, coach, facilitator, rapporteur.

Nancy Margulies - From knowledge management to knowedge participation 

Debbie Showler - Debbie is an IT consultant and certified Idea Mapping Instructor from Canada.
            

Vanda North - Vanda runs her own company: The Learning Consortium.  She was the founder and global director of the Buzan Centres from 1988 to 2006.
          

Lex McKee - I found Lex’s work by chance while searching for example of the work of mindmappers that commenters and survey respondents recommended.  He works with Vanda in the Learning Partnership.

 My thanks to all who filled in the survey, commented and gave me names and links to the work of other mindmappers who produce wonderful hand-drawn work.

The survey is still open, and any hints on other great producers of hand-drawn mind maps will be investigated with interest and probably blogged about.  Anyone with any leads to Elaine Collier’s work on the web?  [now solved]

Roy

Hand-drawn mindmaps face-off: Part 2 — Survey results

Monday, October 27th, 2008

A month ago, I set up The Great Hand-drawn Mind Mappers Face-off when I invited you to tell me your favorite maker of hand-drawn mindmaps from the best five I had found.  I had a survey on the subject as well.  In response, your comments, direct emails and responses to the survey came in, telling me of other mappers that you thought I should know about.

Soon, I’ll post about these additional mindmappers who produce high-quality work by hand, with examples and links to their work, but first the results of the survey.

As I said originally, this was not a survey about “who’s best”, but rather who is your favorite amongst the five.  I wasn’t very surprised that more people said that Adam Sicinski was their ‘absolute favorite’ than anyone else, with Austin Kleon a close second and Jamie Nast third.  Paul Foreman had very solid support in the ‘I really like this’ and ’Pretty good’ columns - almost across the board, in fact.  All great mind mappers, though.

‘Imagination’, ‘Drawing capability’, and ‘Useful ideas and thinking’ played an almost equal part in influencing respondents’ choice of favorite.

I’m leaving this survey open, so anyone finding the original post can add their ideas.

Roy

Information systems, technology and the human factor

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

I walked into the room for a meeting ahead of time - and found a noisy and excited argument in progress. I was just an outside consultant, there to act as facilitator, so I focused on getting my laptop hooked up and the projector working.  I wanted to get the participants building a mindmap of agreed successful points with me quickly, as well as discussing issues found, which is all they wanted to talk about right then.

We were there to discuss what the users were expecting from a new information system, and the developers were scheduled to present the results of feedback from the first round of user testing.

That particular meeting did eventually calm down, but wasn’t a good start and would have been more productive in other circumstances.

Now, I have a different approach that brings out these problems, which were principally about trust, at a much earlier stage and deals with them differently. It changes many other aspects of getting business information systems out that really deliver what’s required - it’s called VPEC-T and you can read about it, and see a detailed mind map by following the links here: VPEC-T the 5D lens and here: VPEC-T the mindmap

If you’re involved with information systems at the intersection of businesses and information technology, take a look and let me know what you think.

Roy
Click to visit the full map:

Mindmap of the VPEC-T thinking framework for information systems

The VPEC-T thinking framework for information systems

TopicCrunch goes Pro

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Search Engine Professionals, now you can …
… see how all your domains are doing in the SERPs,
… do this against many, many keywords, and
… do this with just one unattended run.

The new TopicCrunch PRO can aggregate multiple projects into one run.  This means you can save your own time: Get on with something else, and look at the results once everything has been gathered up.  One run can show you how your domains are doing against many keywords.  So now, and with very little effort, you can see how effective your Search Engine Optimization efforts are, every day, each week, or once a month, as you wish.

Setting up batches is made easy using a step-by-step wizard.  Or if you’re a tech wizard yourself, you can use a text editor to make batch and project files.

The installer is available here:
http://www.topicscape.com/TopicCrunch/download-topiccrunch.php

All purchasers of TopicCrunch (now called ‘TopicCrunch basic’) will receive a  FREE  UPGRADE  to TopicCrunch Pro.  You will need a new license, so find the original license email that you received when you bought TopicCrunch, hit the Reply button and change the subject line to “Claiming free upgrade”.

You may have to wait a few days, so please be patient – we shall be issuing these upgrade licenses manually, but you can install TopicCrunch Pro and trial it for 30 days anyway.

If you haven’t bought TopicCrunch basic yet, the door is closing but it’s not quite closed.  All purchasers up to midnight Tuesday 7th October will be eligible for the free upgrade.

Buy TopicCrunch basic quickly - yes now! - and get the upgrade to the Pro product FREE.

Roy

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