Today marks the eighth anniversary of our other founding partnership: our marriage. July 29th, 2000 was the Big Day not only for the two of us, but also for Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

We know that popular opinion lays the blame for the Brad-Jen breakup at the feet of a certain Ms. Jolie, but we recognize a completely different kind of relationship pressure. With all the press coverage of their marriage, did you ever see them pictured with matching his 'n hers PowerBooks?

We don't want our own marriage to fall victim to the specter of insufficient technology. And yet the traditional roster of anniversary gifts is still geared towards the analog lifestyle.

To celebrate our half-hex anniversary, we're proud to present a new, geek-friendly set of recommended anniversary gifts. Do note that the recommended 8th anniversary gift is a nice, fresh web link...hint, hint.

Year	Traditional	Geek	Notes
1	Paper	Manuals, documentation	Electronic documentation is just as appropriate as paper manuals.
2	Cotton	Tech conference and tech culture T-shirts	100% cotton and size-appropriate, please, if you want to create passionate users.
3	Leather	Protective cases, luggage	Before you buy that leather laptop case, make sure your geek isn't a vegan.
4	Fruit, Flowers, Linen, Silk	Apple product	To a true geek, there is no fruit besides Apple.
5	Wood	Fonts, input devices	Early typewriters were made from wood.
6	Sugar, Iron	Red Bull, energy snacks	Sugar, in its geek-preferred form.
7	Wool, Copper	Circuit boards, hardware upgrades	Circuit boards use copper circuits.
8	Bronze, Pottery	Web links	Bronze is used for bells, i.e. a way of drawing people's attention.
9	Pottery, Willow	Data storage	For holding things -- the modern equivalent to willow baskets.
10	Tin, aluminum	Enclosures, CPUs	CPU enclosures are often made from aluminum.
11	Steel	RAM, memory	RAM chips are typically held in a computer by steel clips. Think of this as the digital equivalent of a wedding photo album.
12	Silk, Linen	Security devices and software	Silk is made by worms. Security software protects against computer worms.
13	Lace	Portable electronics devices	Microchips, like lace, used to rely on women with good eyesight to do the manufacturing (both have since automated). Assembly of small products still relies on fine motor work by women.
14	Ivory	Electronic instruments, speakers	Piano keys were originally made from ivory.
15	Crystal	LCDs	Liquid CRYSTAL displays. Get it?
20	China	GPS	Ceramics are part of the miniature antennas used in GPS devices.
25	Silver	Digital photography equipment, image capture	Silver used in early photo processing.
30	Pearl	Smart phones	Like the Blackberry Pearl.
35	Coral, Jade	Linux boxes	The Linux OS, like coral, is made up of thousands of individual contributions that are nonetheless "commonly perceived to be a single organism".
40	Ruby	Web applications	Preferably applications written in Ruby on Rails.
45	Sapphire	Laptop computers	Laptop screens use LEDs; some LEDs use a sapphire-like crystal as part of the manufacturing process.
50	Gold	MP3 players	Gold is used in semiconductors; radios were one of the earlier applications of semiconductors.
55	Emerald	Code, custom software	As created on the Emerald Isle.
60	Diamond	Pre-release alpha technologies	Synthetic diamonds are projected as a future material for superconductors, capable of withstanding great heat.

Click here to read part 1, an introduction to digital mind mapping.

MindMeister works a lot like MindManager, with the features I've come to see as essential for a good mind-mapping experience:

• rapid creation of new nodes and node "children". (Hitting return creates a node; tab creates children of the node you're on.)
• automatic linking of nodes. When you create a node, it's automatically linked to what's already on the map (as opposed to a tool like OmniGraffle, in which you manually link nodes.)
• support for visual elements to illustrate/highlight

• control over color and font of elements
• attach files or hyperlinks to any node
• intuitive and visually pleasing interface
• drag-and-drop editing so you can quickly reorganize your thoughts

In addition, MindMeister has a bunch of great web-specific features:

• share maps with colleagues
• track edits to your mind map via e-mail or Twitter
• publish maps to your blog or elsewhere online
• use offline (via Google Gears)
• Skype integration to chat with your collaborators
• change tracking to see who added what

• optional automatic link maker (links the selected node to the most relevant web page for that term)
• enterprise version to brand MindMeister for use with clients
• browser extensions and widgets that make it easy to add to your default mind map
• and of  course, an a.p.i. (developers, start your engines.)
• export to FreeMind, Mindjet and other formats (premium only)
• prompt, non-bureaucratic customer service (i.e. when i asked them for my free upgrade after Rob paid for his premium service, they didn't hassle me about the process whereby I'd referred him)

But what makes MindMeister rock my world is the fact that it lets two or more people work on a mind map at the same time. No locking and unlocking the document; no waiting a minute while your collaborator's changes show up. If you and a colleague are editing the same map concurrently, you'll see each other's changes in about five or ten seconds.  This makes the experience of collaboration a lot less like Google Docs (which we use regularly, in exchanging drafts of a document) and a lot more like SubEthaEdit (which we use constantly, to collaboratively write or note-take in real time).

MindMeister goes to work for Social Signal

As an almost real-time collaboration tool, MindMeister unlocks a whole new way of working together. You're not limited to linear structures (like task lists, documents and even wikis). You can take notes, jot down ideas or capture information -- then dynamically and collaboratively reorganize it. Where document sharing (at its best, i.e. real time in SubEthaEdit) can feel like writing together, with MindMeister you can actually do your thinking together.

We've been using MindMeister for a little over a month, and already we've used it to:

• plan and outline writing projects
• wireframe the navigation structure for a website
• outline a community engagement plan
• diagram an organization chart and decision tree
• map out deliverables for a complex project
• figure out the relationship among multiple overlapping technical terms
• map out responsibilities on a complex project

But if you really want to understand what MindMeister can do for you, you've got to see it in action. So here is the very latest mind map we've created -- a map of where mind mapping fits into the big picture of collaboration tools that we use here at Social Signal.

(Click and drag on the map to move it around so that you can see the whole thing. The tools with the hearts are the ones I personally use every week, if not every day. Click here to see the map in all its glory on the MindMeister site.)

Share your thoughts for a chance to win a free year of MindMeister premium

Are you using MindMeister yourself? Curious about -- or experienced with -- some of the other tools on the Social Signal map of online collaboration tools? Have another approach to collaboration that you prefer? Tell us your ideas about mind mapping and online collaboration, and you could win a free year of premium MindMeister service, which lets you maintain more than 6 maps, download your maps to your local machine, attach files to your topics, and is 100% ad-free.

Share your thoughts by:

• leaving a comment on this blog post
• responding on your own blog or site, linking back to this post
• creating your own MindMeister map  (please link to it by leaving a comment below)
• any other nifty collaborative online way that you want (just let us know what it is!)

Post your thoughts by August 5, 2008. Social Signal will treat the author of the most intriguing or helpful idea to a free year of premium MindMeister service.

Most online collaboration tools engage your left brain: that part of you that likes structure and organization, and supports linear, sequential thinking. Think of Basecamp, with its careful system of tasks and milestones. Or Google spreadsheets (I have dozens of them!) organizing everything from budgets to menus in neat, orderly rows and columns. Even wikis seem to work most effectively when they are gardened into a coherent structure, with some kind of intentional hierarchy of information.

That's ironic, because the web itself is a very right-brain medium: hyperlinks let you flow from site to site in the same kind of random, intuitive and creative way that your right hemisphere works.

The latest addition to the Social Signal toolbox is a terrific online application that engages your right brain very effectively: MindMeister.

MindMeister is an online mind mapping application that lets you collaborate in producing visual representations of information or ideas. A mind map typically looks like a tree or network: you put your title or central idea in the middle of a piece of (real or virtual paper), and then you draw branching lines outward to capture related ideas and most crucially, relationships among ideas.

In this two-part blog post I'll introduce you to mind mapping and to MindMeister. Part 1 (you are here) introduces mind mapping and some of the options for digital mind mapping. Part 2 looks at MindMeister's features, and how we use MindMeister for collaboration at Social Signal. Part 2 also includes a MindMeister-generated map of a range of online collaboration tools at Social Signal, so even if mind mapping doesn't seem like it's for you, you may want to check out some of the other tools on our map.

Birth of a mind mapper

The king of mind maps is Tony Buzan, who has written more than a dozen books about mind mapping and its various uses for improving memory, study habits, et cetera. Buzan argues that mind mapping

harnesses the full range of cortical skills - word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness - in a single, uniquely powerful manner. In so doing, it gives you the freedom to roam the infinite expanses of your brain.

I became quite a dedicated mind mapper while in grad school, using mind maps to take most of my notes on course readings, chart entire sub-fields of political science, and outline my own papers and thinking. That was back in the olden days, so I did my mind maps on paper, which had the advantages of being very immediate and making it easy to implement Buzan's recommendations to engage visual thinking with lots of colour and imagery.

This is part of a paper-based mind map I created while studying for my general exams in political science in 1997. It summarized the major debates and authors in the field of political culture. (This is just a snippet -- click here to open the entire map in a new window.)

But it had some significant disadvantages: there was no easy way to edit or move around elements within a mind map, and I usually arrived at my afternoon seminars with my forearms covered in a rainbow of ink (from letting them rest on top of all the coloured pens I had open while mapping).

Thanks to the popularity of Buzan's work, we now have lots of software options for ink-free mind mapping. I've tried out a lot of these over the years, and have found that different tools work well for different kinds of mind maps.

Mind mapping goes digital

If you're creating a map to diagram an organization or information structure you're actually going to implement, you need a lot of control over layout options, so something like OmniGraffle is great. (That's what we usually use for information architecture work, i.e. planning out the navigation structure of a web site.) If you're creating a map to organize your thinking, it's better to use something that automatically creates relationships among elements and lets you work very quickly: after years of searching, I was recently delighted to discover MindManager, which I now use regularly.

I've also tried using Personal Brain, which I discovered through Jerry Michalski: it has the potential to become your primary tool for information management, since it can grow to virtually infinite size (Jerry has thousands of items in his brain), and can even replace your finder or file browser. In addition to letting you map topics, Personal Brain lets you attach notes and URLs to each item in your brain, so you could actually use it to replace your current system for managing bookmarks.

I took it for a spin over a few weeks in February, but it feels like the kind of tool you'd need to work with for quite a while before understanding its full potential or assessing its fit for your personal workflow, and my trial license ran out before I was ready to commit to it.  If Personal Brain establishes del.icio.us integration, so I can keep del.icio.us links synched to a brain, I'll be tempted to try it again.

As a committed mind mapper and a devotee of social web applications, it was inevitable that I'd want to get a little peanut butter in my chocolate. Rob and I do a lot of our writing and thinking together, and most of our creative tools are eventually subjected to the "but can we do it together?" test. Thanks to my recent love-in with MindManager, it occurred to me to Google the phrase "collaborative mind mapping" and voilà, I found the extremely fabulous and user-friendly MindMeister.

Continue to part 2 for details on MindMeister -- and a chance to win a free year of premium service >>