Cool Tool of the Week: Collaborative Mind Mapping with MindMeister

I have never been a person who thinks in straight lines — yet I've always been someone who likes to outline before I write.  So… mind maps are a natural for me. I've used them (in pen and paper form) ever since high school to organize my thoughts.  About a year ago, one of my Internet Marketing mentors, Bob the Teacher introduced me to Freemind (a free mind mapping program to use on your desktop.  He has an excellent free report to get you started on how to use mindmaps to be more productive.

But, as I was working with clients, I discovered that I wanted to use mindmaps to collaborate.  I started by sending freemind mindmaps back and forth but then I discovered mindmeister - an web-based mindmap that allows you to share and collaborate online in real time.

In addition to planning out my writing, I have found MindMeister to be *very* helpful when presenting my Tame the Internet Monster classes.  My students can all be logged into the same map and make changes and additions as we go through the class material.

The maps are also interactive.  In the new version (released this month) - you can link tasks to your icalendar.  You can also e-mail either just an idea to your primary mindmap or an entire mindmap to your account.  You can also work on the mindmaps offline using google gears.

Changing colors, adding branches, attaching notes are all very easy and the maps can be imported/exported from FreeMind and MindManager.

Mindmeister would be absolutely perfect if it somehow linked tasks my task manager Remember the Milk — but each edition gets better - so I'm sure it is just a matter of time.

You can get a starter account that allows you 3 maps for free.  Mindmeister has also given me 10 free 3-month premium memberships to give away.  Leave a comment if you would like one and I will send you the serial number.  Happy mindmapping!