OK, to most of you this reply to Ken Burge's Mindmap Article might come pretty late, but I've just received the Joel Comm's Top 1% Report October 2008 three days ago :-( It seems it takes almost a month or so until it gets over here to Germany...

Well, that said, here's what I think about Mindmaps:

I don't understand that hype that's everybody's making  about mindmaps:

The major advantage of a mindmap in my eyes is when used on paper or on a whiteboard because it makes it easier to add additional topics/branches than when using a "traditional" hierachical top-down structure...

The non-linearity is not really true either: we are conditioned to read from left to right and from top to bottom, so the positioning of the branches and sub-branches imply an order if intended or not does not matter.

Another "problem" that mindmaps also don't solve is visualizing crosslinks: i.e. in Ken's example the closeness of iMindMap (sub-branch of Software) and creative IQ (sub-branch of Intelligence) is not visible, quite the opposite: the far distance between  the two is rather implying a contadiction between the two (they are on opposite ends of the mindmap which we associate with being opposite to each other)

So, when I'm  brainstorming for a topic to write about I've moved back to the classical hierarchical structuring that any wordprocessing software supports, be it Microsoft Word, OpenOffice's Writer or Google's Documents (formerly known as Writely) which is also great for online collaboration...

Just my 2ct...

Please comment

Michael