Today, we had an inquiry from a freelance writer about what Topicscape could do for him and what uses we had seen it put to.
When he wrote back, he described the reply as ‘kickass’, so I didn’t feel I could let it go to waste. After all, he’s a writer and I’m not, so who am I to judge? This is what I told him:
If you are gathering information for a writing asignment, particularly if it is a complex topic with many ramifications, you will have a need to research the subject, scope out how far the article will explore the terrain, and collect information to support your writing.
Topicscape lets you do these tasks simultaneously, and in a way that doing one supports the others.
As you research and collect reference material, you lay it out in Topicscape’s 3D landscape that reflects how you feel the topics are related. You place the web pages, text files, images or just simple notes under Topicscape’s control at the same time. Topicscapes can be very large – thousands of topics and tens of thousands of file attachments is common for serious users.
Yet the 3D landscape keeps complex collections of information under control and quickly accessible. You can fly and zoom around the landscape, focus the scene on a different area, search by words, or navigate through the hierarchy of topics on those occasions when the right word or phrase just doesn’t come to mind.
A significant and unique property of Topicscape’s visual presentation of the information is that you start to recognize where you are. Finding reference material can often feel like looking for something in your home or neighborhood–using your sense of place–and this saves time.
We have some real-life stories at the web site
http://www.topicscape.com/userstories.php
If you are undertaking fiction assignments, Topicscape probably has less relevance – I would recommend Liquid Story Binder in that case. Mind you, writers who develop complex worlds and characters that span many books (Tolkein, Pratchet, or the scriptwriters for Star Wars, say) might have found Topicscape’s information organizing capabilities very useful.
Roy
