Eric Blue's Blog

By shear serendipity (ala Google), I stumbled across a truly great paper on Personal Knowledge Management. The paper, titled Building the Memex Sixty Years Later:
Trends and Directions in Personal Knowledge Bases, is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive pieces of literature that I've read on PKM (Personal Knowledge Management). This paper was written by 3 students at the University of Colorado (Stephen Davies, Javier Velez-Morales, and Roger King) in Aug 2005.

Two key things from this paper really stood out to me:

1. The distinction between the role of objective and subjective realms when it comes to PKM. For example:

   "... the objective realm – the set of electronic documents and other information that are available to a group at large. This is often the entire public domain, as with the World Wide Web, but sometimes it may be communicated only internally with an organization. The key factor is that it consists of materials everyone within a large group has access to, and views identically (ie., a given text appears the same to everyone.)
   a subjective realm – the viewpoints, interpretations, classifications, and relationships that an individual perceives when examining the objective realm. This set of elements is unique to each observer. It represents the ongoing accumulation of knowledge each person builds as they browse and learn from objective sources. It need not consist solely of elements from the objective realm, as the observer will also bring in their own background knowledge and biases, but it is most often primarily comprised of such objective elements."

2. The depth and range of coverage of the existing PKM solutions (mindmaps, outliners, wikis, semantic web technologies, and numerous references to historical PKM products)

If you're interested in Personal Knowledge Management, I would *highly* recommend checking out this paper. My curiosity about the Memex has been peeked recently, and this paper definitely re-enforces the notion that others are interested in also achieving this vision.

I was able to find this pretty easily (by luck) via Google, however there is a limited distribution notice in the paper itself. So, i'm not certain if I can or should provide a direct link. However, you can check out the link to the ACM Portal (ACM subscription required). It seems the link on ACM is referencing a new paper published in 2006, which I have not yet reviewed:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142431

And, of course, you can simply Google the paper title in quotes and you should be able to find the .pdf pretty easily:

Google "Building the Memex Sixty Years Later: Trends and Directions in Personal Knowledge Bases"

Posted by EricB at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Thanks again to del.icio.us, I discovered an amazing site today called Thinkbase.

"Thinkbase is a new way to navigate and explore information on the web. It is what we call a 'Visual Wiki'. It is based on Freebase, an open, shared database of the world's knowledge - in other words a Semantic Wiki. Thinkbase uses a visualization tool (Thinkmap) to create an interactive visual representation of the semantic relationships in Freebase."

This is actually something I've been wanting to do with my own Personal Knowledge Manager(a.k.a. Semantic Wiki or Memex). I'm a huge fan of visualization, and ThinkMap (The software used to power ThinkBase) is a pretty comprehensive toolkit. I've looked at quite a few different visualization solutions over the last few years, and ThinkBase is one of the most impressive ones. Recently I came across a stunning Flash-based project by Ruben Swieringa
called the interactive mindmap (http://www.rubenswieringa.com/blog/interactive-mindmap). It would be interesting to leverage some sort of open source solution like this to accomplish what the guys at ThinkBase have done. Overall, ThinkBase is a step in the right direction and I'm hoping it gets some well-deserved attention.

Posted by EricB at 11:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I've been personally waiting for something like this for a while....

What is JIT?

The JIT is an advanced JavaScript infovis toolkit based on 5 papers about different information visualization techniques.
The JIT implements advanced features of information visualization like Treemaps (with the slice and dice and squarified methods), an adapted visualization of trees based on the Spacetree, a focus+context technique to plot Hyperbolic Trees, and a radial layout of trees with advanced animations (RGraph).

Read more at http://blog.thejit.org/javascript-information-visualization-toolkit-jit/

Posted by EricB at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

ReadWriteWeb has posted a fantastic (and detailed) list of tools for information visualization:

"Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data."

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php

Related Post:
http://eric-blue.com/blog/2006/10/dataesthetics_the_power_and_be.html

Posted by EricB at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

The other day, ReadWriteWeb posted an interesting article on Visualizing Social Media Fatigue.

"Our attention is stretched so thin these days that there are times when I have actually tried to register for what I thought was a new service only to realize later that I already had an account -- it just got lost in the shuffle. With so many new web sites and services vying for our attention it is easy to feel the effects of social media fatigue. Andrew Shuttleworth, a social media junky living in Japan, thought it might be helpful to try to map his social media usage. The result is a staggering view of how information we put on the web flows."

You can check out Andrew's original post here:
http://hq.andrewshuttleworth.com/hq/2008/02/social-media-on.html

Posted by EricB at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Information Aesthetics recently posted about a new music visualization interface from Burst Labs.

And, here's a quick summary from NotCot:

"The Discover interface of Burst Labs is mesmerizingly brilliant ~ and there’s a melody for every mood you could possibly feel or imagine, and truly one of the most refreshing flashy user experiences i’ve encountered recently. Burst Labs is the latest brainchild of The Burst Collective: which Compose + Produces Music, Licenses Music, Records Music, and now gives you an incredible multi sensory experience to browse this ambient digital music space. Odds are you’ve already heard their music and didn’t even realize it… "

I compiled a list of compelling music visualization resources last November. I'll be sure to include the Burst interface in my next major update.

Posted by EricB at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Last week I started adding SpeedLinks to this blog. I've been looking for a good excuse to experiment with Yahoo Pipes for some time now. So, I wanted to find out if I could take the concept of the original Perl script I found, and create a pipe to do all the work (with little, to no programming). This original script basically does the following:

1) Allows you to store your Speedlinks with del.icio.us using a common tag like 'speedlink'.

2) Fetches Speedlinks using the Del.icio.us API on a daily basis (tag='speedlink', date='YYYY-MM-DD)

3) Parses the XML output using XPath, creates an HTML summary of the speedlinks, and automatically posts a blog entry.

For those of you that haven't yet heard about Yahoo Pipes (from their website):

Pipes is an interactive data aggregator and manipulator that lets you mashup your favorite online data sources.
Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:
* combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate to create your ultimate custom feed.
* geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
* remix your favorite data sources and use the Pipe to power a new application.
* build custom vertical search pages that are impossible with ordinary search engines.
* power badges on your web site.
* extend your web site by accessing the JSON or RSS output from Pipes.

The following screenshot illustrates what the pipe looks like after you run it. You can choose to download the query results in RSS or JSON format:




Now that the 'RSS Filter By Date' pipe was created, I proceeded to create a new pipe 'Del.icio.us Speedlink Filter' that accepts your del.icio.us username, speedlink tag, and date range (default is UTC today, but can be converted to any date range) and linked to the RSS filter pipe.




Unfortunately, one major limitation I found with Pipe's RSS output is that it strips a good bit of the original metadata associated with the original feed. This is discussed in the following post. Although you do get the original link, name, and description, the tag info is lost. If you want to include tag info in the speedlink results, you'll have to download as JSON and parse/format to HTML.

Although using Yahoo Pipes to parse and fetch my del.icio.us links definitely works and is nifty, it doesn't really simplify the original approach. But, this experiment was certainly fun, and it definitely shows the potential of Pipes to allow users to easily create, and manipulate data with little to no programming required.

Posted by EricB at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Brian Shaler hosts a fantastic collection of Digg visualization tools at http://brian.shaler.name/digg/. Some of these tools include the Wheel of Upcoming Stories, the Digg RADAR, and DiggTaggr Data Visualization.

Posted by EricB at 08:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Lee Byron at megamu.com has posted an article illustrating some visualization using the Last.fm social music service.

Posted by EricB at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Information Aesthetics (infostetics) recently posted an intriguing article on a new network monitoring product called Netcosm.

"Netcosm is one of many technology projects underway in the NetQoS Performance Labs and is one example of research on advanced visualization techniques to make complex network performance data simple.... Using color, shape, speed, size, changes in sound tone and level, and even smoke, fire, and explosions, Netcosm shows real network traffic traversing local and wide area networks, and when and where performance issues occur, whether they are in the network, server or application."

Posted by EricB at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Information Aesthetics recently posted this great video that illustrates US home prices since 1890 as a rollercoaster ride!

Posted by EricB at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

This video is pretty amazing. Find out more about Reactable here.

"The reactable is a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

Posted by EricB at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Nikon has released a nifty flash application called Universcale. From their website:

"We are able to view all entities, from the microworld to the universe, from a single perspective. By setting them up against a scale, we are able to compare and understand things which cannot be physically compared.

Today, using the electron microscope and astronomical telescope, we can see the objects which we have not been aware of its existence before. Are you able to fathom, or even roughly grasp, these sizes?"

Posted by EricB at 05:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Why is it that the beginning of the year always feels electrical with the excitement of *this year* being the one where you achieve all of your most important goals? Like most people, starting on New Year's, I spend time thinking about my goals, write many of them down, and start taking action. While I am happy with the progress I've made in the past, I've had the feeling that many of my goals seem to lose momentum after a few months. Starting a couple months ago I began researching how I could effectively be reminded about my goals on a daily basis, but not be overwhelmed by tons of information or underwhelmed by boring goals written on a piece of paper.

My research has paid off. I've leveraged my interest in information visualization, organization, and mind maps to create a unique approach to goal setting, and I want to share this technique with you. The entire process of getting your goals into the mind map takes 4 steps:

Overview
Step 1 - Find Your Purpose and Passion
Step 2 - Create Your Vision
Step 3 - Download the Mind Map Template and Install Mind Mapping Software
Step 4 - Write Down Your Goals

Overview

The mind map template I've created serves two purposes:

1. Give a quick overview - All of your goals can be easily printed and viewed on a single 8 1/2 X 11 piece of paper. Goals are organized by a particular area of your life (Physical, Financial, Relationship) and allows you to be reminded to keep a healthy balance. And, all goals have visual markers to show their priority in relationship to each other.

2. Save detailed information - Since the mind map will also be saved on your computer, you can add much greater detail than the printed version. This detail includes specific information for how you will achieve your goal (who, what, when, where, and why). And, also allows you to write down your longer-term goals, and even keep a personal journal.

The Internet and Blogosphere is literally filled with thousands of e-books, articles, blogs, and websites with tons of information on how to set goals. I'm not going to try to reinvent the wheel for this article, so I'm just going to give some pointers to some of the more useful resources I've found. OK, so let's get started.

Step 1 - Find Your Purpose and Passion

Many people (my past self included) usually start setting their goals, and don't spend a lot of time figuring out who they are, and if these are the things they really want. It's like the analogy of making progress climbing the ladder, but only finding out that your ladder was up against the wrong wall the whole time. The point of finding your purpose is to locate the one thing that your absolutely passionate about in life, and then realign all of your activities and goals to that purpose. Here are some great links:

Steve Pavlina - How to discover your life purpose in about 20 minutes

Curt Rosengren (Passion Catalyst) - The Occupational Adventure Guide

Personal Development Ideas blog - Discover Your True Self

Step 2 - Create Your Vision

Once you've uncovered your true purpose and passion, you should be feeling a lot clearer about the direction you want to take. Let's take it one step further and create your vision. You're vision is the long-term plan for what you *really* want in your life. Visualization is key, and there are some fantastic techniques you can use.

- Visualization

Instigator Blog - Achieve Your Goals With 3 Types of Visualization

- Written Vision Statements

Radical Mutual-Improvement - Write your ideal scene

- Vision Collages (Treasure Map)

Curt Rosengren (Passion Catalyst) - Treasure map

- Video Vision Statements

I've started blogging about this recently. Malcolm Cohan has created a fabulous way to make your own video vision statement. I'd highly recommend this!

Malcolm Cohan's Website
Eric Blue - Vision Statement: The Power of Goal Visualization
Eric Blue - My Personal Vision Statement

Step 3 - Download the Mind Map Template and Install Mind Mapping Software

I used MindManager to create the mind map template, however I can recommend some other (and free) mind map applications.

Mindjet MindManager 6 (Free 5-day Trial/Commercial)

FreeMind (Free/Open Source)

ConceptDraw MindMap (Free 30-day Trial/Commercial)

IMindMap (Free 30-day Trial/Commercial)

Now you're ready to download the goal mind map template:

Online Preview

Online Preview Using MindMap Viewer (flash)

Downloads
[Right-click and select Save Link As]

Goals Mind Map Template (.mmap)
(63KB, Mindjet MindManager format)

FreeMind (.mm)
(24KB, MM format)

Goals Mind Map Template (.xml)
(246KB, XML format - can be imported to other programs)

Screenshots

Step 4 - Write Down Your Goals

OK, this is it, the moment you've been waiting for! Fire up your mind mapping software, and load the template you just downloaded. To make your goal mind map most effective, I'd recommend setting a few guidelines when settings goals:

1. Balance in your life is important. I've created 8 major areas for categorizing your goals, ordered from right-left: (1) Physical/Health, (2) Career, (3) Contribution, (4) Finances, (5) Rest/Play/Hobbies, (6) Relationships, (7) Mental/Emotional, (8) Spiritual. These are not set in stone, so feel free to rename or modify these categories.

2. Try not to have more than 5 goals per each area.

3. S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Based) guidelines should be followed
*Who: Who is involved?
*What: What do I want to accomplish?
*When: Establish a time frame.
*Where: Identify a location.
*Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

4. Assign each goal a priority within each respective area.

1 = Most Important: Critical!
2 = Desired
3 = Nice to Have

5. Focus is on short-term goals, but long-term goals are listed to keep perspective. Write down 3 year, 5 year, and lifetime goals.

6. Emphasize between 1-3 Top goals for the year. These take precedence over all others.

Posted by EricB at 01:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (1)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I just caught an article on O'Reilly Rader titled "Pipes and Filters for the Internet". Yahoo has announced a nifty new service called Pipes. According to their site:

"Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant."

AND

"Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line."

I've checked out a few of the mashups, and some seem pretty useful. And, the visual environment is pretty astonishing. Here's one mashup that caught my eye:

Picture Near Place
Uses Yahoo Maps, Yahoo Local, and Flickr
URL: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/clM0ZwC32xGXPn8Jphr.og/

You can basically search for pictures within a certain area. The default search looks for parks in the 94024 zipcode that contains trees.

Here's a screenshot of the visual pipe editor.

This service is worth keeping an eye on!

Posted by EricB at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

The other day I posted about an intriguing project by Mike Love called The Genealogy of Influence. You can check out his blog here. Since I also recently blogged about the Many Eyes project by IBM, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could take Mike's original data and upload for visualization.

I took the source GraphML file here, and *very* quickly parsed it to generate a tab-delimited file. I simply parsed each EDGE entry using Perl and created a hash for each person. This hash listed the individuals that person influenced, the people they were influenced by, and a tally for each of those data sets. This data is obviously not normalized since I planned to try out a few different visualization types using the same source data.

e.g.

The upload data set was posted here.

Here are some of the visualization types I experimented with.

Network Diagram
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6QIEzkheOE2-
This is somewhat similar to the graph on the Geneaology of Influence site. However, it's not a directed graph, and it's not interactive like TouchGraph.

Treemap
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6XIUr1qeOE2-
I think the treemap is probably the most interesting alternative to the network/graph diagram. You can easily switch between the people that were most influential, and also who had the most influences.

Bubble Chart
URL: http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S2fqLEsOtha6eI-caxeOE2-
I tried this last visualization method just for kicks. The bubble chart isn't the most effective visualization, but it does allow you to easily see influence by bubble size.

Posted by EricB at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

IBM recently announced a new project called Many Eyes.

According to their website:

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.

In a nutshell, Many Eyes brings information visualization to the masses. This site allows users to share and access existing data sets. And, visualize these data sources using a variety of techniques: treemaps, geographic maps, charts, and network diagrams.

This project is worth keeping an eye on!

Posted by EricB at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I discovered an interesting project today on del.icio.us. The Genealogy of Influence project is an effort to document and visualize the creative influences of great thinkers and artists. The is of great interest to me, since I've had a similar idea that's been on my "pet project" list for some time now.

Posted by EricB at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I discovered a comprehensive collection of diagrams related to Integral Philosophy
and Ken Wilber.

Flickr Integral Diagrams Set

Integral Diagrams Blog

Posted by EricB at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I've been using a great application for the last few months and I figured I would share my thoughts. Like most people, I use Wikipedia as a major source for research. One of the challenges I've always had though is getting caught up in "information serendipity". I tend to start reading one thing, and eventually discover many new interesting links, and ultimately forget what I was originally looking at.

The answer to my information attention defecit problem has been Pathway. Pathway is a Mac OS X application that is basically a visual/relational Wikipedia browser. The UI has 4 main components:

This video helps put things into perspective.

Posted by EricB at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Now this is an amazing timeline poster! I'd like to see somebody try to create a digital version of this using Simile Timeline. ;)

Posted by EricB at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Update: I've created my own vision statement, and posted here.

I found an amazing video this evening on MindHacks.org. A gentleman from Australia named Malcolm Cohan has put together a fantastic production titled "Think It So" that illustrates the power of goal visualization. You can visit his website here. Or, his YouTube page here.

His visualization technique, called a Vision Statement, is a twist on traditional affirmations and goal setting. In a nutshell, rather than using a paper-based goal visualization technique like a Treasure Map, or a Goal Collage, he has taken a high-tech approach and opted to create a slideshow/video of inspiring photographs, with music and captions that focus on what you want to achieve. Check out the video.....

Malcom is conducting an online seminar in Jan/Feb with step-by-step instructions for how to create your own Vision Statement. I'm definitely looking forward to this. I think this is going to be a powerful tool, and can see this gaining an enormous amount of momentum. I'm not sure if this is specific to my personal experience, or if these topics are becoming more mainstream, but there might be a new trend forming here.

Over the last year, I've had a couple recurring themes popping up in my research and day to day experiences. One major theme has been the Law of Attraction and Manifestation. Last year (in fact almost a year ago today) my wife's aunt gave me her copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill.

Shortly after reading this book, I started to dig back into success literature and some personal development websites. I was lucky to come across Steve Pavlina's excellent blog and found a pivoting article on the Law of Attraction. Shortly after reading this, I discovered The Secret DVD and finally got around to watching it last week. It's definitely an amazing piece of work, and hopefully will make many more people aware of how much they can affect their own reality.

Overall, I'd say the concept behind the Law of Attraction and Manifestation are intriguing. Regardless of one's personal belief in the possibility of esoteric metaphysical phenomenon that help shape our reality, I think there is real power in intentionality. In the case of the Vision Statement, I think this technique above all helps to:

1) Bring Clarification - the shear act of producing a vision statement (or treasure map/goal collage) will help people better figure out what they really want to accomplish in life. I'd recommend reading Steve Pavlina's numerous posts on finding your purpose and setting goals. It's probably safe to assume that 90% of the population is not willing to spend the time doing this exercise. This means that you are going to be much more prepared to recognize and act on opportunity when it presents itself.

2) Reinforce Focus - if you truly intend to be serious about watching your Vision Statement everyday when you wake up and before you go to bed, then this type of repetition is going to dramatically affect your focus and attention. In a sense, repetition of something used in a positive context, is going to help raise your level of consciousness. Learning to focus daily on your goals and what you want to achieve is going to help filter out (or significantly lessen) obstacles to your goals. These obstacles can be negative/repetitive thoughts, negative situations or relationships, spending time working on the wrong things (e.g. things that won't significantly help propel you to your goals). Short-term hurdles won't stop you from reaching your long-term goals.

3) Magnify Passion - one thing I've read and experienced numerous times is that you can visualize all day long, but if there is no emotion/energy/passion behind your goal then not much is going to happen. I believe that the critical detail in getting an effective Vision Statement is to pick your images, music, and affirmation text carefully. Whatever the goal or desired outcome, it needs to hold a lot of meaning for the person. And, it should bring about an intense feeling (intellectually and emotionally) when viewed. Coupled with repetition, this type of experience can really help motivate people to achieve their goals and stick with them even when motivation is naturally lowered (due to time and mood), or when different opportunities present themselves.

Naturally, wishful thinking by itself isn't going to be very effective. However, if you create an inspiring vision, energize it, and be consistent, then this is going to dramatically improve your mental focus and ability to acheive what you want. I think this, by itself, is going to really help a lot of people. Of course, factors like environment (physical and social), skill, knowledge, and determination are other tools that will ultimately help your chances with getting what you want in your reality.

Posted by EricB at 08:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (2)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Maps of War has created a visual timeline of the History of Religion. It's interesting to see 5,000 years of history in 90 seconds. Check it out.

Posted by EricB at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I've recently started looking into how mind mapping is used in the software/system development life cycle. One of my passions (and profession) is software design and development. Since I started mind mapping a few years ago, I've been slowly introducing mind maps at my current job. I began using mind maps (courtesy of Mindjet's MindManager Pro) to help streamline the process of researching new technologies and products. I discovered that this technique was much more efficient than trying to use traditional bookmarks (or del.icio.us for that matter), or knowledge managers (like General Knowledge Base or DevonThink). And, I could quickly share with others, without needing to create a separate document to summarize my findings.

Over time I increased my usage of mind maps to encompass capturing meeting notes, product requirements, and technical design discussions. Although I wouldn't typically use mind mapping techniques during any whiteboard sessions, I would capture meeting notes afterwards and convert to a mind map. When sharing maps with others, I would upload to our intranet in both MindManager format and export as HTML for people who hadn't yet downloaded the mind map viewer.

As a whole, I would say the feedback and general acceptance of using mind maps for our projects has been very positive. On numerous occasions, team members would still be consulting the maps even months after a meeting had taken place. And, I personally think that reviewing the mind maps after a tradional meeting/whiteboard session can really improve communication and recall of the information later on.

I became curious as to how other individuals and organizations are using mind maps in their development process. After reading Chuck Frey's excellent Mind Mapping Survey, I discovered that a large percentage of the survey respondents (500 people in total) are using mind mapping for project planning (52%) and business process mapping (30%). And, of the people that listed their mind map use as "other" (9%), there was mention of documenting software requirements, and software development and modeling.

I decided to start Googling on this topic and came up with some interesting results. The following are some links and resources related to the use of mind maps in various phases of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).

Investigation/Feasibility/Planning

Mind-mapping tools are finding a home in corporate IT
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=112247

Using mind mapping software for web research
http://mindmapping.typepad.com/the_mind_mapping_software/2006/10/using_mind_mapp.html

Turning systems models into projects
(Related to ORM - Outcome Relationship Model)
http://duffill.blogs.com/beyond_crayons/2006/07/turning_systems.html

Funnel timeline: A visual approach to project planning
http://mindmapping.typepad.com/the_mind_mapping_software/2006/12/funnel_timeline.html

Project estimating - Mindmaps are a tool in the armory
http://www.mind-mapping.org/mindmapping-for-project-management/project-estimating-with-mindmaps.html

How to use mind mapping software for project management
http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleDetails.asp?a=148

Mind Mapping and Project Management
http://www.mindmappingstrategies.com/project-management.aspx

Mind maps provide a view for collaboration
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=112247

Analysis

Agile Modeling with Mind Map and UML (StickyMinds Article)
http://www.stickyminds.com/testandevaluation.asp?Function=edetail&ObjectId=11861&ObjectType=ART

Utilizing Mind Maps for Essential Use Case Specification
PPT (PowerPoint)
HTML

MindManager for Software Development: Part 2 - Requirements Gathering
http://mindjetlabs.com/cs/blogs/synergist/archive/2006/11/07/MindManager-for-Software-Development_3A00_-Part-2-_2D00_-Requirements-Gathering.aspx

Design

Sharp Development - Mind Mapping for OOAD (Object-Oriented Analysis and Design)
http://www.sharpdevelopment.com/MindMapping/MindMappingForOOAD/MindMappingForOOAD.htm

Agile Modeling with Mind Map and UML
PDF
HTML

UML Modeling Tool - JUDE
(Convert Mind Maps to UML)
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/professional.html#mindmap_convert

Coding

Generative Programming with MindManager and XSLT
http://blog.mindjet.com/2005/12/generative-programming-with-mindmanager-and-xslt

Testing

Mind Maps Foster Thorough Test Design
http://www.infoq.com/news/2006/11/test-design-mind-map
Original Article

Mind Mapping for Test Planning
http://www.sharpdevelopment.com/MindMapping/MindMappingForTestPlanning/MindMappingForTestPlanning.htm

Implementation/Integration

MindManager for Software Development: Part 1 - Help Authoring
http://mindjetlabs.com/cs/blogs/synergist/archive/2006/10/07/MindManager-for-Software-Development_3A00_-Part-1-_2D00_-Help-Authoring.aspx

In the near future, as mind mapping becomes more mainstream, I can imagine that various mind mapping techniques and products will be used to streamline the software development process. Personally, I think it would be a great use of time to come up with a set of common mind map templates for use in software development projects. Something along the lines of ReadySet, or Steve McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide templates. This sounds like a great pet project for 2007.

In the meantime, I'd be interested in hearing any feedback on how individuals or organizations are currently using mind maps in their development process.

Posted by EricB at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

Over the last few years, I'd say that my musical taste has expanded quite a bit. I now listen to artists and genres that I probably wouldn't have given a chance before. This is in large part to my Rhapsody subscription. Rhapsody can recommend music in a few different ways:

My Rhapsody - recommends new artists/albums based on previous tracks I've listened to

Instant playlists - creates dynamic playlists

Top artists per genre

New album releases per selected genre

This type of recommendation is certainly valuable. But, it is limited by the fact that you don't have a lot of flexibility in specifying the criteria for how the music should be recommended. In the last year or so I've noticed a number of free services that take the concept of music recommendation and make it much more dynamic and feature-rich. For example:

Visualization - the ability to view a mind/concept map of artists and how they relate to each other

Basic Search - search by artist/genre

Advanced Search - search by musical preference - find new artists and songs by music tempo(slow/fast), mood(uplifting/dark), genre (pop, techno, etc), and era (70's, 80's, 90's)

Social Recommendation - what do other users like?

User Feedback - the ability to flag likes/dislikes about songs. The system will adjust future playlists based on this feedback.

Sample Music - can you listen to a sample?

Update: (01/06/07) I've added a couple more sites based on recent discussions and discoveries. Thanks to Sean Coon for an interesting post on user rating/feedback, and pointing out Pandora. As more sites and services come out, I hope to keep this list up to date.

Musicovery

http://www.musicovery.com/index.php?ct=us
Features: Visualization, Advanced Search, Sample Music

Music Lens

http://www.musiclens.de/contest/
Features: Visualization, Advanced Search, Sample Music

Gnoosic

http://www.gnoosic.com/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search, Social Recommendation

Music Map

http://www.dimvision.com/musicmap/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search

Live Plasma

http://www.liveplasma.com/
Features: Visualization, Basic Search

Last.fm

http://www.last.fm
Features: Basic Search, Social Recommendation, Sample Music

Pandora (Music Genome Project)

http://www.pandora.com/
Features: Basic Search, Social Recommendation, Sample Music, User Feedback

TuneGlue MusicMap

http://audiomap.tuneglue.net/
Features: Basic Search, Visualization

Posted by EricB at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?

I discovered a great post this afternoon at Life Clever titled '6 illuminating concept maps you should know about'.

http://www.lifeclever.com/2006/09/01/6-illuminating-concept-maps-you-should-know-about/

These concept maps include:

1) Java Technology (I posted about this last month)
2) How does DNS work?
3) What is a brand?
4) How do organizations track customers to retain them longer?
5) What is Internet search?
6) What happens during a heart attack?

I'd highly recommend reading this post for anybody interested in mind/concept mapping and information visualization.

Posted by EricB at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Post to del.icio.us | Do you Digg it?