Online mindmaps

I make a lot of notes to keep tracking ideas, todo lists, document outlines, even for my blog posts. My notes tend to have quite hierarchical structure: items are nested with others often several levels deep. For a long time I had been using TWiki installed on localhost at home, but main issue was it was not accessible from outside world, so I was unable to reach them at university or at work. Also, editing big entries in a small html form, posting it, opening for editing and so on were all much inconvenient. Then I moved to Google Notebook. I could review and edit my notes anywere I could access the web. I was comfortable to have several notepads, each having appriopriate secions etc. I only lacked an easy way of linking/referring note entries one to another.

As my notes became longer and longer, and I used more and more nesting, Google’s Notebook turned out to be quite inconvenient too. It gets a little sloppy when it has to load a bigger document - it’s not so fast as Google Doc is. And now they’ve just included some odd behaviour when one pastes links within notepad. It might be of use for most people but it totally wrecks up my structured notes when I paste links!

So I’ve just managed to review some online mind-mapping tools. I’ve been planning this for some time but I hadn’t much urge to do it. Now that I was forced to look for some replacement for my notepad I thought it was high time to try mind-maps.

I’ve gone through a number of them and picked up two. I was looking for tools that:

• are absolutely free - no premium accounts, no functionality dropped for basic, free accounts
• provided collaborative mindmapping - so I could not only share my mindmaps with others, but do online brainstorming too
• it would be best it didn’t use Flash nor Java - AJAX would be the best for me

I’ve choosen these two:

• http://www.mind42.com
• http://www.wisemapping.com

These are compeletly free, easy to use, AJAX-based online mindmapping tools that enable collaborative brainstorming. I encourage anyone to try them out.

Oh, and I’ve also came across this quite useful tool: wikimindmap.org. You can browse wikipedia articles as mindmaps. Article subsections are represented as nodes and can be expanded. Every article is a separate mindmap. Well, maybe it’s not the most convenient that you have to jump to another mindmap when you come across article boundaries, but anyway, I think it very useful. Every time I want to learn about new technology, I open both google and wikipedia but often it’s quite hard to pick up most interesting parts of an acrticle at one glance. Now with wikimindmaps it becames a lot easier.

Here is an example mindmap about java.