Mind-mapping and knowledge-mapping have been around for a while, but I never bothered with them for personal use because there was too much overhead with taxonomy, price, etc. I finally downloaded an evaluation version (i.e., after 100 days, you can only create 100 thoughts in a project) of a product, and have been using it quite a lot lately. It's the first thing that has really replaced notes on a white board and Post-It Notes and scraps of paper for immediate and long-range 'to do' lists.
It is really what I wanted: a graphic heirarchy of topics that you can arrange at any time (i.e., add or delete links, change parent and children relationships), add information about one of your topics at any time, in a structured (types, keywords) or free-form format (text notes). Customization for colors, graphics, hyperlinks, etc., so you can link to all of the stuff that you mentally associate with a topic. Despite all of the information, the files are suprisingly small: 51kb for a project that includes everything associated with fixing up a new house, and all of my tech projects.
I used a product called "Personal Brain" (v3.0) from a company called "The Brain Technologies" ( http://www.thebrain.com ), which describes itself as "Virtual Search and Cataloging Software". They also have an enterprise version, and some suprising customers, including the U.N.
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