Mind-Mapping to News Dots: It's all about Relationships
When I was in college, I learned the mind-mapping technique as a visual way of taking notes and organizing ideas. The approach was simple: Write down a key idea, draw a circle around it, and use lines to connect it to other relevant key ideas. And we used an ancient technique called "handwriting" to do it! Here'a an example of a fancy hand-drawn health mind-map from Tony Buzan.
Next came software that made it "easier" (really?) to draw circles and lines, or at least better looking and more uniform mind maps. The key though was still identifying the concepts and deciding how they cluster and connect. You can probably senses my bias. Before embracing a new technology, I always ask myself - is there a low tech way to get the same results - like mapping concepts by hand.
Now Web 2.0 technology is shining the light on mapping not how we think concepts interrelate, but on how our tagging and clicking demonstrate relationships, like tag clouds for example. Ramping concept mapping up further is Slate's just announced News Dots: "An interactive map of how every story in the news is related, updated daily."
Bottom line: As human beings, we naturally organize information in ways that saves us processing effort. We like when things cluster together around an idea, story, event, or person. Like good marketing, it's all about relationships.
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