I came a little late to this post by one of my favorite mindmappers, Austin Kleon (hat-tip to Philippe Boukobza for the link). It’s titled Mind maps: Pictures and words in space and is an engaging run-through of Austin’s unique uses for mind maps, from July this year.
And if you want to know why I call this a “prequel” you’ll need to look through a few of my recent posts. While you’re at it, why not vote at the favorite mappers survey, if you haven’t already done so?
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.
This one really appeals to my association of knowledge and information with landscape (which is where Topicscape came from). For pointing it out, I have to thank Jeremy Wagstaff, who reviewed Topicscape a year ago in the Wall Street Journal.
I just heard from Peter Jones who’s found Topicscape and linked to us, and went on over to his site to look around. What a treasure!
I hardly started and already I can see it soaking up a lot of time in the next few days (or weeks). I entered at http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/linksTwo.htm and it left me gasping. I haven’t dared peek at /links.htm, /links3.htm and /linksIV.htm yet. (Notice the interesting numbering system? I wonder what he’ll use if he goes to a fifth links page.)
Now there are two kinds of link pages: The bang-everything-on-a-page (often as part of a link exchange) and “we’re done” type; and the analyzed, categorized and value-added type. Peter’s are decidedly value added.
It’s hard to keep up with the on-line tools appearing to help those of us who often like to do our thinking in a visual workspace.
Kayuda
Today Kayuda (http://www.Kayuda.com) popped up. This is a concept mapping tool rather than one for mindmapping and describes itself as a visual wiki. It does call itself a mind-mapping tool but not having any center, mindmappers would probably disagree. It’s in public alpha (there’s confidence for you!).
Online info mapping is becoming a lively and interesting space now.
Bubbl.us
First there was Bubbl.us – basic bubble-diagrams (http://bubbl.us). Watch the spelling! I caught myself several times with bubble.us and reported certificate problems here. Apologies to bubbl.us.
Mindomo.com
Next came Mindomo.com (http://www.mindomo.com), a site from Romania which gives an interesting on-line mindmapping experience.
Mindmeister.com
Then we had Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com), from Germany and this seems to be the slickest and most complete, especially as it is still in private Beta and releasing new features periodically. Sign up for their newsletter and you may get an invitation to the Beta.
I said “First there was Bubbl.us” but in fact long ago there was Mayomi. It seems to have died now – its web page is a kind of open source advertising portal.
Roy
Updated 03/19/2007: Corrected mis-types in two URLs.
The Mindmaps Directory continues to grow. I just did an update and it now has 600 thumbnails and links to examples of mindmaps, concept maps and other visualization techniques, all over the web. All categorized by map type and tagged.
One a smilar, but more static, theme to the images arising out of drawing all airline flights in the USA, is this fascinating finding. If you draw lines on the map that connect all the zip codes in the USA in numerical order, a pattern emerges.
It has been a good day for visualization. http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html has to be the best summary of graphic methods for representing data, information and concepts I’ve ever seen. Probably the best there’s ever been in one web page. Now all we need is to get a Topicscape in there. Trouble is Topicscape would span across the Information Visualization, Concept Visualization, and Strategy Visualization areas on this ‘Periodic Table’ of graphical elements.
The new version (now coming to the end of its Beta period) of Topicscape allows you to save a page like that as an MHT file and have it running totally off line with all scripts working. (IE7 can save it but has to get a lot of the data on-line).
As you can guess from my association with Topicscape, I love information visualization and think it offers unique help when we try to understand data. A good example I just came across is at http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html. Aaron Koblin, the designer, has his main site at aaronkoblin.com.
