Mindjet at Gnomedex 5

Mindjet was fortunate to be invited to present at Gnomedex 5 this week in Seattle. Gnomedex is an event that brings together (in a very entertaining, "un-conference" environment) people who are thinking about, writing about and writing blogs and creating podcasts (blogs that are comprised of audio–radio shows that you can listen to on, say, your iPod–hence the name) and other forms of media.

The message I take away from the conference is that blogs and RSS have the very realizeable potential to really fundamentally change the way people (in the most generic sense of the word) communicate. They will do this because they virtually eliminate the barriers to posting content to the Internet. Without blogging, people need to figure out how to post and manage content to a web site.  Not many people are up for that. But blogging tools enable a great many more people to write whatever is on their minds (about the state of the world, their state, their city, town, block, dog, garden…), add photos, music and maybe video-and release that to the entire world. Pretty cool. People used to say that the this was what the Internet was meant to do. That’s debatable. But anyway, that’s what it can do now.

What the conference teaches me is that we as a company can do more to use blogging and RSS to listen to customers, to create a community of our own, to tell people who are interesting in mapping about how other people are using MindManager–and in their own words.

Great conference, and I’ve gotten a lot of good comments on the software–and even some on the presentation. Here I am, preaching the gospel:

Thanks very much to Jeffrey Luke, a Seattle photographer, for the shot.