Promoting MindManager and Mind Mapping with a display in my local library

Today I set up a display in the window of Alresford Library, my home town. Being right next to Tesco Express means 100s of people walk past every day and my display is there for two weeks. Unfortunately the library is only open for 21 hours in the week.

I had some feedback from an IBM friend who said "I need to explain it more" and my neighbour said "Drag the school teachers down for a look".

Here are some photos of the installation:

The Location

The front view

The inside view

Note: I have a blank mind map which I hope visitors to the library will add to.

Alresford is a commuter town for London, has many IBM residents and who knows who else will be visiting the steam railway - Watercress Line.

Mind Map of Presentation about Blogging & setting up WordPress

Latest version of MindManager 7 Pro and Mindjet Connect

The latest version of MindManager and the first release of Mindjet Connect were available from the Mindjet site yesterday. I am treating these as two separate entities for now.

MindManager Pro7 (version 72.E.374) is a service pack which has a Mindjet Connect client. Use MindManager's check for update function or go here to get it.

You do not get access to Mindjet Connect until you subscribe. You can get a trial subscription here.

If you would like to test your trial with me send me an invite from Mindjet Connect.

Can you use MindManager to create a business card?

I am running an experiment this afternoon and getting some great feedback from my friends on Ecademy.

Draft 2

Draft 2.1

Draft 2.2

What do you think?

A map of the Applications of MindManager blogged so far

I have been wondering what to blog next. So I thought I will look at the index on my blog. Well I have not found the whole index in Blogger yet so I decided I had better construct one of my own to make sure I don't blog about something different.

Here it is the index of my blogs so far. Split into eight categories

MindManager map of the Twitter and Related World

This is an example of how MindManager can be used to quickly aggregate knowledge for sharing with others. I started the map at 9:38 this morning and the first version was on the web at 10:46, it was in the Ecademy twitter Club at 10:54 and I Tweeted it at 10:55.

Click for the full screen view. Click the map to go the web page indicated.

For those wondering what this is all about. Twitter is web application which allows you to publish 140 character messages to the web. Sort of SMS on the web but rather than one to one it's one to many. You follow other peoples Tweets and they follow yours. Click my Twitter link to see what I mean.

What you Tweet about is up to you. It can be social, it can be business, it can be a mix. You can have multiple accounts with different purposes. The search tools above allow you to find people with similar interests and start a conversation. Of course if you publish frequently about your niche knowledge, service or product. You may be found. See what Mark Shaw is doing with respect to ebooks.

My thanks to the members of the Ecademy Twitter club for providing all these references in their threads.

The map above is self explanatory. What follows is for Google to find and was created by exporting the map to Word and removing the links because I want you to interact with the ones in the map :)

CCabre's Birdworld

1 Twitter

= 140 character messages to the world

1.1 Bird Feeders - Ecademy Twitter Club

1.2 Blog Baths - GottaBeMobile

1.3 twhirl a twitter client

= Managing your twitter

1.4 Twitter4Skype

= So you can call or chat with a Twit about their Tweet with one click

1.5 The Twitter Club

= Share twitter know how

12 Ways Twitter Can Improve Your Efficiency

10 to Follow

Ecademy club posts & comments to Twitter

1.6 Summize Conversational Search

MindManager

1.7 Real-time Twitter Search Tweet Scan

Ecademy

2 Wakoopa

2.1 Ecademy Team

3 Flock

3.1 The Social Web Browser

4 FriendFeed

4.1 Aggregate all your friends guano

5 Twits

ajwilcox, thomaspower, markshaw, clarocada, hensel, mgpoole, simon_morice

Producing event signs with MindManager

I used MindManager to produce the signs I need for a recent Open Space event on an A3 Canon iX5000 printer. This proved to be a very effective way to do it. MindManager by default fills the printed page. Simple signs can be made using the Central Topic for the text and using the line and background colour to produce signs like the meeting location names.

Note each of these signs is the same width but because of the number of letters the width height ratio changes. Padding out with spaces or changing the topic margins can help.

Slightly more iconic signs can be produced using the image library. For instance the one Law of Open Space is you can use your feet.

For the Four Principles of Open Space I used a music festival as an analogy. 120,000 turned up for this one, it always finishes dead on time (they want to use the same field next year), queuing early is good - you start meeting people and the comic folk singer brings along an opera singer. The audience switched from mass morris dancing to Nessun Dorma. Photos mine, event courtesy of Fairport Convention. Here I placed the images in floating topics and arrayed them around the central topic.



But next time I will make them separate central topics and print them each on their own sheet of paper. They were too small on a big wall.

Or I could use the poster printing function in the print menu to produce a 10 foot banner like this one. Which is just an image and text in central topic with no shape.



You can see what happened at the event in maps, video and photographs at Open Minded Day 01.

I hope this give you some ideas for your events. Any questions, please ask.