Sunday, November 18, 2007

Map Your Mind -- No Charge

FreeMind is a terrific brainstorming tool. As its name implies, you can get it for no charge. The software falls into the category of mind-mapping, i.e., getting concepts, essays, songs, web site structures, marketing campaigns, anything you can think of into a graphical, flexible, easily modifiable form. OK, you might just be happy with a pencil or pen and paper--but this application allows you to drag branches/nodes of your mind map from one to another instantly, including all sub-branches/nodes. No eraser required!

Among other things, you can embed hyperlinks in these nodes and assign styles and graphics to them. You can link to files on your own computer as well. I recently used FreeMind in a cowriting session (my cowriter's willingness to try working this way is much appreciated), and we both found it to be quite useful in our quest to get to the bottom of a hook we liked. The icing here is that you can save your files in outline and/or picture form, right to a web page of your choice--so your map is structured with collapsible/expandable branches or categories.

You can download FreeMind here: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Happy mind mapping!

No comments: