[Widgetopia] As sites have grown larger and more complex, ways to navigate them is changing. The hyperbolic tree shows promise. The one found at the XRCE website is particularly easy to understand and navigate.

KurzweilAI.net are also using a similar navigation tree for their Brain of words and terms related to Artificial Intelligence. It is powered by (yes!)The Brain, a sort of mindmap software that can *also* be used as a navigation interface on your website or to map the whole content of your hard drive and replace Windows Explorer like Jerry Michalski does. You can currently download the RC1 of their v.3 for free and play with it (I did). They have a tutorial but you barely need it, it is very easy to start mapping your thoughts. And playing with it for a few weeks, I had troubles preventing it from taking over my desktop as well as my brain and ideas. Only limitation at the moment, it is still rather difficult to share your thoughts or mind maps with other people, let alone print them out flat for a meeting.
What TheBrain calls thoughts, IHMC CmapTools calls them concepts. They claim their “software empowers users to construct, navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps”. And so it does, I have also been using this one for a few weeks now and it is much better if you need to print your thoughts flat out on paper to share, you can also publish the maps you want to share on servers.
Other softs I still have to try include:
- Axon Idea Processor
- FreeMind on SourceForge.
- MindManager