Excellent online brainstorming tool

I am totally digging this. It's a Flash-based, in-browser mindmapping tool. It is fast, simple, good-looking, easy to use, and -- this is more important than I used to think -- fun to work with. All the shapes and colors make me more creative. I've been working on a redesign of one of my courses, and part of the process has been trying to organize the content of the course visually as it currently stands. This service has made it really easy. I love it. Thanks bubbl.us!

Embedded mindmap:


Partial screenshot (click to enlarge):

Dandelife: blogging about the past?

Dandelife describes itself as a "social biography network." Very interesting concept. The idea of "blogging" your stories of the past, your memories, strikes me as potentially very fruitful. I'm interested in seeing how they work the publishing angle. People who want to do this seriously will want their content to be very portable. I also see the potential for extensive educational uses (think of it as an easy entree into oral history-like applications for students and their families).

Related sites of interest:

Sponit: basically one-off blog entries.


Panraven (just got a beta invite): sophisticated multimedia storytelling; format mimics a printed book with multiple pages per story and flexible text and image layouts.


Then there's always the "datablogging" site Reger.com, which I've been curious about for some time.