In its simplest definition, a Mind Map is "a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea". Second Life's Virtual Information Technology Group, led by Butch Dae are working to bring that concept into the virtual world. Though as yet the Second Life build is pretty minimal, consisting of some nice graphics of the mind map and some globes that give out notecards and web links, the project isn't lacking in ambition, wanting to map " The computational hardware, software, and human systems that handle the ever-increasing amount of available data" and the functionality of the inworld system is in a permenant state of development much like the web2.0 tecnologies it catalogs. .
The nice thing is, builds and fancy formats aside, all of the information collected by the project is available free, and is open source and from what I can gather, contains a bazillion nodes of information. Just email gekurtz@comcast.net and request a copy. There are plans to make it simple for people to add to the database, and integrate web and Second Life much more closely, but for now it's all "in the works", though still fun and interesting to see..
Visit the Second Life site here [SLUrl]
There's a 3D-worlds type of mind mapping software that I've been using as in information organiser since its release to public beta a year ago. This is 3D Topicscape at http://www.topicscape.com
No avatars, but you can fly around the landscape, re-centre the landscape on a new topic, enter topics and see all the stuff inside them, and open files. It's desktop software, not web based, so its more for stuff you'd want to keep personal.
Regards
Vic
http://www.mind-mapping.org
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
Thanks a lot Vic, will check it out today!
Vulcano Mind mapping
Vulcano is an island where many italian residents freely build, script, and experiment with the Second Life platform in a creative, knowledge-sharing, community-based environment.
I'm not so much involved in the mind mapping topic, but I'd say that a fellow resident of mine, Malachi Mulligan, made some interesting steps about 3-D Mind maps:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vulcano/153/101/28
Instructions are in italian language only right now, but I'm pretty sure we could translate them to english if there is enough interest about it.