About 8 months ago, I was dabbling around with MindManager org charts and took a Snagit snap of one and then started rapidly adding hot spots.  Before you know it I had a pretty complex image and when I went to save or export it, I realized that I had to save it to Flash.  I’ve taken intro level classes in Macromedia Flash, but working in Snagit was a great deal easier for what I needed to accomplish.

I wasn’t trying to make a South Park cartoon episode nor make a radical flash animated website, just a functional, clickable org chart.

Several months later, and I got around to experimenting more with this functionality, and I think it is extremely useful in making a mindmap very rich in content for sharing either on the web, or for sharing directly with people that do not own MindManager.

Sorry Mindjet, this one may not help sales, but as soon as you find some more ways to get rich media into MindManager, I’ll be a very loud evangelist again.  Until then its work around city!

So I put together a couple maps (one political trying to make sense out of the news and probably failing, and one about a new Google advertising ad system).  Neither make much for reading, but I treated the topics as an opportunity to play with MindManager, Snagit and learn something new.

Plus, it was a good excuse to procrastinate on hunting down some cheap flights to Austin for SXSW.  I hate booking flights.  I have no reason for this, just always feel like I’m getting ripped off.  I’d almost rather drive.

After creating those, I received a email or call from someone in the MindManager Yahoo Group asking me to walk through the creation process and did that.  During that session, I learned and realized that these files do not have to be published on the internet, but that they can be viewable from a hard drive as well, the video shows this in practice and shows how it works.

Page Popularity for Site: 45% [?]

I have been waiting for a service like this for years.  Qipit takes images that you snap with your mobile phone camera or just a regular digital camera of things like white boards, hand written notes and other documents and converts them to text using OCR, Optical Character Recognition, technology which has evolved very significantly over the last 12 years.

As a heavy mindmapper I often times try to use electronic mind maps instead of a regular white board, but some things are just easier on a white board.  I use mind maps so heavily because they enable me to capture that information very rapidly. 

However with this type of service and application, I have the ability to get a great electronic backup with very little effort.  Not to mention, I can get electronic iteration captures as the white board notes evolve say during one of those meetings where it seems like everyone will step up and drive the dry erase marker over the white board to get a feel for the issues or add to the discussion.

Now with my 1 megapixel camera on my phone, I can only convert images from white boards.

However, these days I always carry a small digital camera with me as well.  With that I can also upload images from my computer to the site and have documents scanned and read via OCR as well or even have hand notes converted.

Or Here’s a great tip if you are Mobile without a WiFi connection or computer

Take the picture with your regular digital camera.  Pull the flash card out of the camera and drop it into your phone or smart phone and add the better quality image as an attachment and send it to Qipit via email!

So in review this is a very cool and did I mention FREEEEE!  service.  It takes your pictures of handwriting from white boards or even from printed documents and uses OCR technology to create a soft copy or it can even publish straight to your blog or website.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of electronic white board tools and applications, even some touch screen surfaces requiring expensive investments in large screen devices and the wiring and connections and tuning and plasma mount to keep it from falling off the wall, etc, etc, etc. 

This is just a simple little solution that is ready to go for almost any user and the setup only takes about a minute.

Page Popularity for Site: 67% [?]

I put together this short video to show that it is possible to record your screen and audio while simultaneously dictating with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.

I should point out that my first attempt at this took about 4 minutes and my video software crashed at the end. I do not think that had anything to do with the combined requirements on my system. I’ve seen the same video software crash for no reason without anything running. It crashed during the compilation process and not during the recording.

Page Popularity for Site: 17% [?]

Page Rank

Page Rank used to play a large role in Google’s analysis of link popularity for returning successful search results.  But Google doesn’t hire some of the best mathematicians from around the world to build complex formulas for nothing.  Nope, they keep those guys working around the clock in some bunker of a laboratory under Shiloh Mountain working to determine if a websites words contain the right keywords to refer their customer searcher. 

They are trying to stay ahead of the many Search Engine Optimization SEO specialists that learned how to manipulate Googles Search Results by inflating their Page Rank.

LSI

Google now uses new metrics including a system referred to as Latent Symantec Indexing (LSI) which is a process that looks at the incoming links to your website and reviews the content on the page they came from and the header or title of the page at that location.  A referring page with the link to your site will score higher for your site if their content is similar in nature to your page where they are linking to yours.

Link Baiting

The key is that you want to build unique content that everyone on this Google’s Green Earth will want to link in their own webpage or blog.  If you can come up with that content and copyright it until the cows come home, then you can maitain your sites popularity.

Blogs are a great source for contextual referral services.   Sponsors can connect with Blogitive, who will pay bloggers to review and  write about your site with the keywords contextually written up in a way that maximizes the LSI potential and which can spawn more link baiting.  So if you have a website and want to get or keep your natural search engine traffic, you might want to consider baiting that hook and if visitors are important for your business then chumming the water might even land you a bigger Google fish.

Page Popularity for Site: 12% [?]