Collaborative Mind Mapping

Recently I made a vacation trip to England and Scotland. Before setting on my journey I decided to use Facebook to tap in to the wealth of information about the UK. I created two mind maps on Cacoo -an online collaborative drawing tool; took a snapshot of the diagrams and posted it on my FB profile. Each map listed a few places I knew were interesting to see in London and Scotland. I shared the edit rights of the maps with everyone. But Cacoo requires you to create and account, sign in and do all that to edit the diagram.

I posted the diagram on my profile with an edit link and asked my friends for suggestions. Within 30 minutes I had at least 5 comments suggesting awesome places to visit. What I noticed is that nobody tried to edit the map in Cacoo itself. Maybe they were short of time, maybe they didn't want to go through the sign up process, maybe something else. The diagram above is the final version after I added everyone's suggestions.

Last week I tried again. Only this time it was in Google Docs and it was for the plot of the movie Inception. You can set the security features in Google Docs so that drawing/document editors are not required to sign in - anybody with a link can access. Isn't that purely awesome? Love you Google.