Click here to read part 1, an introduction to digital mind mapping.

MindMeister works a lot like MindManager, with the features I've come to see as essential for a good mind-mapping experience:

• rapid creation of new nodes and node "children". (Hitting return creates a node; tab creates children of the node you're on.)
• automatic linking of nodes. When you create a node, it's automatically linked to what's already on the map (as opposed to a tool like OmniGraffle, in which you manually link nodes.)
• support for visual elements to illustrate/highlight



• control over color and font of elements
• attach files or hyperlinks to any node
• intuitive and visually pleasing interface
• drag-and-drop editing so you can quickly reorganize your thoughts

In addition, MindMeister has a bunch of great web-specific features:

• share maps with colleagues
• track edits to your mind map via e-mail or Twitter
• publish maps to your blog or elsewhere online
• use offline (via Google Gears)
• Skype integration to chat with your collaborators
• change tracking to see who added what

See who added what when viewing a shared map.

• optional automatic link maker (links the selected node to the most relevant web page for that term)
• enterprise version to brand MindMeister for use with clients
• browser extensions and widgets that make it easy to add to your default mind map
• and of  course, an a.p.i. (developers, start your engines.)
• export to FreeMind, Mindjet and other formats (premium only)
• prompt, non-bureaucratic customer service (i.e. when i asked them for my free upgrade after Rob paid for his premium service, they didn't hassle me about the process whereby I'd referred him)

But what makes MindMeister rock my world is the fact that it lets two or more people work on a mind map at the same time. No locking and unlocking the document; no waiting a minute while your collaborator's changes show up. If you and a colleague are editing the same map concurrently, you'll see each other's changes in about five or ten seconds.  This makes the experience of collaboration a lot less like Google Docs (which we use regularly, in exchanging drafts of a document) and a lot more like SubEthaEdit (which we use constantly, to collaboratively write or note-take in real time).

MindMeister goes to work for Social Signal

As an almost real-time collaboration tool, MindMeister unlocks a whole new way of working together. You're not limited to linear structures (like task lists, documents and even wikis). You can take notes, jot down ideas or capture information — then dynamically and collaboratively reorganize it. Where document sharing (at its best, i.e. real time in SubEthaEdit) can feel like writing together, with MindMeister you can actually do your thinking together.

We've been using MindMeister for a little over a month, and already we've used it to:

• plan and outline writing projects
• wireframe the navigation structure for a website
• outline a community engagement plan
• diagram an organization chart and decision tree
• map out deliverables for a complex project
• figure out the relationship among multiple overlapping technical terms
• map out responsibilities on a complex project

But if you really want to understand what MindMeister can do for you, you've got to see it in action. So here is the very latest mind map we've created — a map of where mind mapping fits into the big picture of collaboration tools that we use here at Social Signal.

(Click and drag on the map to move it around so that you can see the whole thing. The tools with the hearts are the ones I personally use every week, if not every day. Click here to see the map in all its glory on the MindMeister site.)

Share your thoughts for a chance to win a free year of MindMeister premium

Are you using MindMeister yourself? Curious about — or experienced with — some of the other tools on the Social Signal map of online collaboration tools? Have another approach to collaboration that you prefer? Tell us your ideas about mind mapping and online collaboration, and you could win a free year of premium MindMeister service, which lets you maintain more than 6 maps, download your maps to your local machine, attach files to your topics, and is 100% ad-free.

Share your thoughts by:

• leaving a comment on this blog post
• responding on your own blog or site, linking back to this post
• creating your own MindMeister map  (please link to it by leaving a comment below)
• any other nifty collaborative online way that you want (just let us know what it is!)

Post your thoughts by August 5, 2008. Social Signal will treat the author of the most intriguing or helpful idea to a free year of premium MindMeister service.

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Most online collaboration tools engage your left brain: that part of you that likes structure and organization, and supports linear, sequential thinking. Think of Basecamp, with its careful system of tasks and milestones. Or Google spreadsheets (I have dozens of them!) organizing everything from budgets to menus in neat, orderly rows and columns. Even wikis seem to work most effectively when they are gardened into a coherent structure, with some kind of intentional hierarchy of information.

That's ironic, because the web itself is a very right-brain medium: hyperlinks let you flow from site to site in the same kind of random, intuitive and creative way that your right hemisphere works.

The latest addition to the Social Signal toolbox is a terrific online application that engages your right brain very effectively: MindMeister.

MindMeister is an online mind mapping application that lets you collaborate in producing visual representations of information or ideas. A mind map typically looks like a tree or network: you put your title or central idea in the middle of a piece of (real or virtual paper), and then you draw branching lines outward to capture related ideas and most crucially, relationships among ideas.

In this two-part blog post I'll introduce you to mind mapping and to MindMeister. Part 1 (you are here) introduces mind mapping and some of the options for digital mind mapping. Part 2 looks at MindMeister's features, and how we use MindMeister for collaboration at Social Signal. Part 2 also includes a MindMeister-generated map of a range of online collaboration tools at Social Signal, so even if mind mapping doesn't seem like it's for you, you may want to check out some of the other tools on our map.

Birth of a mind mapper

The king of mind maps is Tony Buzan, who has written more than a dozen books about mind mapping and its various uses for improving memory, study habits, et cetera. Buzan argues that mind mapping

harnesses the full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain.

I became quite a dedicated mind mapper while in grad school, using mind maps to take most of my notes on course readings, chart entire sub-fields of political science, and outline my own papers and thinking. That was back in the olden days, so I did my mind maps on paper, which had the advantages of being very immediate and making it easy to implement Buzan's recommendations to engage visual thinking with lots of colour and imagery.

This is part of a paper-based mind map I created while studying for my general exams in political science in 1997. It summarized the major debates and authors in the field of political culture. (This is just a snippet — click here to open the entire map in a new window.)

But it had some significant disadvantages: there was no easy way to edit or move around elements within a mind map, and I usually arrived at my afternoon seminars with my forearms covered in a rainbow of ink (from letting them rest on top of all the coloured pens I had open while mapping).

Thanks to the popularity of Buzan's work, we now have lots of software options for ink-free mind mapping. I've tried out a lot of these over the years, and have found that different tools work well for different kinds of mind maps.

Mind mapping goes digital

If you're creating a map to diagram an organization or information structure you're actually going to implement, you need a lot of control over layout options, so something like OmniGraffle is great. (That's what we usually use for information architecture work, i.e. planning out the navigation structure of a web site.) If you're creating a map to organize your thinking, it's better to use something that automatically creates relationships among elements and lets you work very quickly: after years of searching, I was recently delighted to discover MindManager, which I now use regularly.

I've also tried using Personal Brain, which I discovered through Jerry Michalski: it has the potential to become your primary tool for information management, since it can grow to virtually infinite size (Jerry has thousands of items in his brain), and can even replace your finder or file browser. In addition to letting you map topics, Personal Brain lets you attach notes and URLs to each item in your brain, so you could actually use it to replace your current system for managing bookmarks.

I took it for a spin over a few weeks in February, but it feels like the kind of tool you'd need to work with for quite a while before understanding its full potential or assessing its fit for your personal workflow, and my trial license ran out before I was ready to commit to it.  If Personal Brain establishes del.icio.us integration, so I can keep del.icio.us links synched to a brain, I'll be tempted to try it again.

As a committed mind mapper and a devotee of social web applications, it was inevitable that I'd want to get a little peanut butter in my chocolate. Rob and I do a lot of our writing and thinking together, and most of our creative tools are eventually subjected to the "but can we do it together?" test. Thanks to my recent love-in with MindManager, it occurred to me to Google the phrase "collaborative mind mapping" and voilà, I found the extremely fabulous and user-friendly MindMeister.

Continue to part 2 for details on MindMeister — and a chance to win a free year of premium service >> 

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The CBC reports that Quebec's chief electoral officer is studying new rules on "cybercampaigning":

As the internet plays an increasingly important role in political campaigns and elections, rules and laws need to evolve in order to keep the playing field level, said Quebec elections director Marcel Blanchet.

The province's election office is studying how the internet has changed campaigning and electioneering, and will come up with recommendations to modernize current laws, Blanchet told the Canadian Press.

(The original story by La Presse Canadienne is here. By the way, the first new rule should be to ban the term "cybercampaigning". But I digress.)

That's one mighty angry hornets' nest Blanchet is poking, and I'll be surprised if the comments on that CBC story don't rapidly fill up with cries of outrage, echoed in the blogosphere. Let me try to channel a few of them in anticipation: "Quel n00b! You can't regulate the Internets!" "Yet another self-important bureaucrat who doesn't get it." "It's censorship! Soon you'll have to register your blog with the government!"

Admittedly, election officials have sometimes been more than a little hamfisted in their initial efforts to come to grips with the web. (That "register your blog" thing isn't as wacky as it might seem, given the experience in B.C.) But that doesn't mean there's no role for oversight and even regulation when it comes to digital campaigning.

For instance, you could make a very strong case for rules that require a campaign to clearly identify any video material they produce as fodder for a supporter-created-media push. Or a prohibition on phony grassroots blogs, purporting to be written by ordinary voters while being underwritten by a campaign. Or a requirement that anyone being paid by a campaign to blog on their behalf to disclose that fact clearly and prominently.

But how about when third parties with deep pockets jump into the pay-per-post arena? Or crank out slick video clips – either as standalone material or as mashup bait? Suppose it's not overtly in support of a particular party or candidate, but advocates a policy stance clearly associated with them? Recent legislation sharply limits that kind of spending in many Canadian jurisdictions when it comes to traditional advertising; it's not a big leap to apply those caps to the online realm.

Then you come to individual bloggers, especially those with significant audiences. We're fond of thinking of blogging as little different from talking to your neighbour over the fence, or writing a letter to the editor. But if you've put, say, Google Ads on your blog, you're in a sense saying that you have an audience whose attention has a tangible value – and that you're willing to market that attention. So if you direct that attention to the promotion of a candidate or party, are you making a donation in kind?

Does this feel like the counting of so many angels on the heads of so many pins? Maybe. But there are real issues underlying these questions… and a real reason for election spending restrictions. Wealth and power tend to walk hand-in-hand; limiting the influence of money helps to avoid magnifying the concentration of political power in the hands of the wealthy.

The ability to reach large audiences has traditionally skewed toward the wealthy and powerful - but social media is eroding that. With audience comes influence… and the interest of regulators. And if the parade of enthusiastic amateurs who are creating so much of social media are unprepared for that interest, well, regulators (and especially their legal environment) are at least as unprepared for dealing with social media.

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