Dr. Mercola September 27 2008 38,724 views
Mind mapping is a way of taking notes, capturing ideas, exploring concepts and breaking down information into a more readily understood format. There are a million and one uses for mind mapping. You can use it to:
Here are some free mind mapping applications and web services.
Freemind is one of the most popular free mind mapping applications out there, mainly because it’s in Java and thus cross-platform.
bubble.us is a free web-based mind mapping application. You can sign up for an account in order to save your mind maps, but they don’t force you to get an account to start creating.
Semantik is a KDE Linux application for creating mind maps, though they can be viewed in different formats, such as a linear tree view with retractable and expandable branches.
MindMeister is another web app with varying account options; there’s a free account, and several commercial options.
RecallPlus is commercial software with a lighter free edition. It combines the process of mind mapping with flash card memorization techniques, and is aimed at students who wish to take notes and then test themselves using them.
Mindomo is another mind mapping web app with both a free account option and a commercial one. It allows you to share your mind maps with others, and also embed them into your web pages.
Mind42 is a totally free mind mapping web app. The interface is a good one, and it has some excellent features such as easy navigation for large mind maps with zoom and birdview. You can also link branches to other sites and see a preview when you rollover the link.
Labyrinth is a very simple and basic mind mapping application for Linux and Windows.
Vym (View Your Mind) is an application for Mac OS X and various Linux distributions.
WiseMapping is another web app for mind mapping which requires no browser plug-ins at all, which is fantastic when you don’t know which computers you’ll be using in a given day. There is no commercial account option; everything is free and unlimited.
PersonalBrain is a cross-platform application. It’s a commercial application, but a lighter free edition is on offer.
I used the mindmap when is was seeking a job, as a firechief some years ago and I asked the persons who were present at the company if they knew the system, and they didnt so I explained and they were very impressed. My presentation was so good that they offered me the job, and the most important tool was the mindmap system and ofcourse my experience. Back then it was drawed on paper. So I will try some of these systems surggested by Dr. Mercola. Thank you for that.
Love and light Torben
I've been looking for a tool like of this sort for a long time. I can remember, on many occasions, brainstorming about a semantic organization system to make it easier to delve into complex topics from a simple overview.
Having tried many of the widely used technologies like del.icio.us, I was disappointed in the fact that it didn't posses the flexibility and simplicity of these tools.
It is nice to see that such a system now exists and is freely available. Just tried out FreeMind and found it to be a very well suited tool that I plan on integrating into my web site (http://www.mystrangemind.com/) eventually. One feature that really is impressive is the ability to output the mind graph in multiple web formats.
These sorts of tools, especially once they mature, have great potential to revolutionize the way information is displayed and organized. Project design and management could also be efficiently easily organized with this tool. This certainly opens up a great many possibilities.
Another useful tool is WikkaWiki (http://wikkawiki.org/HomePage), which allows you to put Mind Maps from Free Mind and others into wiki pages, to be displayed on your web pages.
Wow. I have been doing this for years, I didn't know it had a name and was a popular way to arrange one's ideas. I wasn't even sure what to call it, but it looked almost exactly like these diagrams.
Interesting!