Monday, May 18, 2009

Twittering for Mind Maps

I am delighted with the amount of mind map information I have gathered with Twitter! As an experiment, I set up a second Twitter account dedicated to mind mapping as part of my upcoming sabbatical project. I intended this to be a way to share interesting sites, software, and uses for mind maps, but I am learning much more than I'm contributing so far. After I did a search for mind maps and mind mappers on Twitter, I was rewarded with a host of Twittering mind map experts from around the world. It seems that mind mappers also tend to be Twitterers and bloggers! Now in addition to my project journal, I have begun a binder of Other People's Mind Maps that I find especially useful and aesthetically pleasing, and I've added to my mind map links on www.delicious.com. (Don't worry, mind map creators, the Librarian's Code of Honor etched on my brain requires me to give credit to any work that is not my own in any of the products I create from this project.) My mind map sabbatical project does not actually begin until January 2010, so this is all advance work until then. For preliminary stuff, it is very exciting.

Therefore, this post has three purposes:
  1. to invite any interested mind mappers out there to follow my mind mapping Twitter self at www.twitter.com/margaretmndmpng and peek at those that I follow, and,
  2. to urge researchers to use Twitter as a research tool in order to find interesting and current perspectives on their topics, and,
  3. to prove that mind maps are a practical tool for writers, speakers, teachers, and anyone who needs to organize information, brainstorm, or improve memory.

What do you think?