A social media and Mind-Visual mapping professional practitioner and consultant; Pascal is a fellow Visual mapping colleague and is integral to the furtherance of this arena. Wallace Tait: Visualmapper

I was really delighted when Wallace Tait invided me to write a guest post for both Visualmapper and Hypershifters. Accepting to write a post is one thing, coming up with an idea is another one. As I had difficulties in this respect, I I decided to ask my Twitter network if anyone could suggest a good theme. One of my tweeple, @marionchapsal, a very keen mindmapper herself, suggested that, as an historian, I perhaps ought to write something about the history of visual mapping. I immediately thought this was a superb idea. On thinking about it further, I however very quickly realised that this was perhaps more tricky than I initially thought. As this was outside my real area of expertise, it would certainly take a considerable amount of background research.

In quite a typical way of how Twitter can contribute to help with the generation of ideas, I however just as quickly came up with a way to go round this problem. Firstly, I remembered reading a tweet by @pgsimoes who was drawing attention to a new web 2.0 site, Timetoast, which makes it easy to create and share timelines online. I was already familiar with the SIMILE software, which allows for the creation of web widgets for visualising temporal data, but had been hoping for a while, that such a software hosted in the cloud would become available, as I could see a real potential for it and it would be very useful for me in connection with my history teaching at the university. Secondly, in another tweet, Wallace Tait, the Visualmapper himself, had also recently pointed towards a post on Philippe Boukozba’s blog about “A visual map created by Walt Disney 53 years ago“. From those two tweets came the idea of preparing this timeline in a very collaborative way by conducting a little experiment in crowdsourcing.

It is necessary to start this mindmap somewhere and a couple of blog posts provide us with a starting point, namely Michael Tipper’s Tony Buzan did not invent Mind Mapping! and Origins of Mindmapping software. I shall limit my own contribution to only one date, which would be Joseph Novak’s Concept Map (1972).

What I would therefore like to do is to ask the readers of both the Visualmapper and the Hypershifters to tell us, what they consider as the most significant dates in the history of visual mapping broadly defined and to provide pertinent links to accompanying illustrations and documents on the web. It would have been nice to create such a timeline on Timetoast, but it will unfortunately not be possible, as it is currently necessary to have a precise date to enter, which includes not only a year, but also a day and a month, and such data will probably not be available for some of the entries. It will therefore probably be best to present the timeline in question in the form of a mind map. A first iteration would work like this.

What would you suggest adding? It is possible to directly make changes to the map, using Mindmeister’s wikimap function, if you already have an account or create one for this purpose. An other option is to suggest additions in the comments of this blog post.

Mindmapping great value for live event(s)

The bulk of the readings will be recorded by World of Minds through livemindmapping. Two mindmappers of World of Minds will record all the information that the speaker shares with his or her audience into a mindmap, a visual association tree containing all information and associations from one central theme which linked together. This type of information capture is ideal for the inspiring TEDx event. TED is all about ‘ideas worth spreading’. The mindmapteam will make sure that the ideas and information discussed can be followed with the livemindmapstream. Mindmapping allows visualization which provides insight in the information during presentations with further impact. The online mindmapstream allows you to see the mindmaps any time. Ideal if you want to share the mindmaps with your collegues or friends, or want to read something back you that missed and want to retrieve.

Unique collaboration with MindMeister

Livemindmapping during TEDxRotterdam is made possible by partner World of Minds and MindMeister, an online mindmapping application. The main feature of mindmapping via MindMeister is the possibility to jointly share and work on Mindmaps. The mindmaps that will be made by our team during TEDxRotterdam,  will be shared via a”live stream” on MindMeiste. It is not the first time that World of Minds has worked together with MindMeister during a TEDx meeting. TEDxAmsterdam2009 was also successfully facilitated in this way.

MindMeister-livestream

Friday promises to be very inspiring day! Due to the exclusivity of the event and the limited number of places, many people are not be able to follow the presentations ‘live’. Especially for those who have no ticket for the event, TEDxRotterdam can be followed still ‘live’ by everyone through the livemindmappingstream!

Want to stay informed of the latest developments of World of Minds on TEDxRotterdam? Follow us on Twitter @WorldofMinds and LinkedIn!

For Hypershifters it is important to collaborate in real time with colleagues and clients. Combine this with MindMapping for overview and insight and it all makes more sense. One of the best offerings on the market is MindMeister from MeisterLabs.

MindMeister is rapidly moving forward to become the most interesting web 2.0 application for collaborative MindMapping. Besides features like Geistesblitz which allows you to enter ideas to you mindmaps without even opening the application (via mail, SMS. (i)Phone and gadgets). MindMeister now teams up with Google apps.

Now you can connect MindMeister to your own Google Apps or buy it at the Google Apps Marketplace. This means that you can save your maps to Google Docs directly and that you can use all your Google contacts in MindMeister.

Check out this introduction movie to learn more about this great integration.

Besides the integration with Google apps, MindMeister also released an new version with some interesting new features.

• Customizable templates (including background colors, images, organic and color branches)
• More Formatting options for the nodes. At last you can use background colors and shapes around the nodes.
• There is a built in chat functionality. This enables you to chat with one person at the time or to perform a group chat with all participants.
• And there is more to come….

If you don’t know MindMeister please check out their tutorial movie at.  It will only cost you a few minutes to get an idea of what this stunning application is capable of.

A Tour of MindMeister from MindMeister on Vimeo.

A complete new review of MindMeister is coming next… Stay tuned.

I posted a 10 minute tutoral on our YouTube channel that shows how you can use the special features of MindMeister in meetings and task management.

I hope this video will inspire you and bring on ideas how you can use MindMeister in your own environment.

Happy hypershifting

Ton Meeuwissen

Test MindMeister while using it for free!

We have an ambitious vision for Hypershifters.com, but we need to begin small. For the next couple of months, we will ask our readers to test drive some new ways of visualization. This is the deal: we provide a license, you report us your feedback.

The first tool we would like you to test is a relative newcomer called ‘MindMeister’, an interesting and innovative application launched as an ‘online mindmapping tool’ with characteristics of an offline application thanks to Google Gears.

MindMeister has provided us with 250 free licenses for a test use of 6 months. If you are curious about this new application and have some time to help us build the complete knowledge base of mindmapping tools, please send in the form and you will receive a full version license for 6 months and a log and questionnaire which we would like you to fill in.

Happy mapping!

The Hypershifters team