MindMeister Mind Mapping Tool

I’ve never been big on mind mapping, or even really understood what it is when it comes to it, but I new I needed a way to organize the web page that would let me see its structure and quickly assess what needed to be done.  After trying in a spreadsheet, I thought about a mind map, and found this pretty useful tool called MindMeister.  I was not planning on posting about it, but after being asked for the link by two people who wandered through the office, I thought it might be good to go ahead and put it out there.

According to Wikipedia, a mindmap is “a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.”  I’m pretty sure I’m not using the tool exactly like it’s intended, but it has given me a way to visually map out my plan for the website and apply icons that give me a quick view of whatever I like.  For instance, I’ve assigned icons next to page titles to indicate how far along they are in development, whether they have an analog on the old site, whether they are part of our site or if they are an outside link, if they link back easily to us, and if they are form-based.  I can take a pretty quick survey of red x’s and see which way I need to be going in the development.

MindMeister is free on the web and allows you to share and collaborate with others on your mindmaps.  The only problem that I’ve had with it so far is that it tends to slow down if left open in a window for a long time, but if you back out to the home page and come back, it’s as good as new.  Also, there is no save button, it saves changes as you go, which while useful, makes me nervous when I leave, but I haven’t lost any data yet, either.

My use is below.  As always, let me know if I can help or if you know of any great uses for this in your work.

delicious.com bookmarking

A lot of people around the library already use delicious.com, but some haven’t heard about it yet, and since it got a makeover today, I thought it would be a good time to talk up a great service. Delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) is a great way to save your bookmarks online so you can get to them from anywhere and organize them with tags (labels) for quick retrieval.  Sharing links with other people who use the service is also incredibly easy.  As useual, there’s a common craft video available that explains social bookmarking in a very easy-to-understand way, so I’ll post the video and then explain about some of the ways that you can use it to connect to the rest of us in the library.

There’s been a bit of a change in the look since that video, but the service still operates in the same way and makes it easy to get to the websites that you save from anywhere.  Delicious also allows you to create a network of friends and share links with them on the fly.  You can see my bookmarks at http://delicious.com/alwright1 and add me to your network.  Judy and Beverly also have delicious accounts that I’m sure they wuld be glad to share with you.

Delicious also creates RSS feeds for every tag allowing them to be used in a number of ways.  For example, the “Useful Links” area in the right sidebar of this blog is updated every time someone tags a delicious post with “ttif” (for this thing I found).  So when I think that something might be useful to everyone, I tag them ttif and they appear here. If you did the same, they would show in the sidebar here, too.  Someone could also choose to grab the RSS feed for that tag and be alerted in their RSS reader everytime someone tagged a new website with ttif.  You can also use a specific person’s tags, so I subscribe to Judy’s “technology” tags with my RSS reader, and now anytime she tags something with the word “technology,” I find out about it.  As always, if you would like me to help you set up a delicious account or would like to know more about it.  Let me know.

What’s all this about?

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of new technology, but getting excited about every new thing is not for everyone. I’m reminded pretty often that not everybody wants to start a blog, wishes to have a social networking profile out there, or needs a wiki. Still, I kept sharing new tools that I use to accomplish every day work and home tasks with Justin, and he said I should be sharing them with everyone around here. With that in mind, I hope to use this blog to share things that assist with jobs or personal tasks that some of us are already doing. There are great new ways to keep track of what you have to do, how much you spend, or where you keep your notes. There are also fun ways to keep a home library or watch tv online, and I like to share.

Things I cover here won’t necessarily be brand new, but I’m sure they’ll be new to someone. I hope most of us will find something useful here. Since not everyone follows blogs or uses RSS, I’ll probably mail out email reminders about posts every now and then. If you have a problem that you think could be solved with a new technology or method, let me know, and I’ll look for an answer. (For example, I’m looking for a way to search my gmail, google reader, twitter, and im histories all at the same time since I often forget from which tool I learned about something. If anyone hears about a way to do all that, let me know!) Hope you enjoy it!

-Andrea