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Last week, in London, I had the pleasure to meet Liam Hughes, co-founder of Biggerplate, the famous MindMap Library.
I asked him 7 questions about Biggerplate, its beginnings, some key numbers, new projects, trends in mind mapping software and some advice for new mind mapping software users. Here is the complete interview.
Liam, when did you start Biggerplate?
Biggerplate
was started in my last year at University and that would be 2007, the first
time of developing the idea. The first version of the website was launched in
2008.
Why did you decide to create Biggerplate?
The idea
from Biggerplate came when I was studying at University and was struggling in
my studies. I was introduced to mind mapping software by someone who thought it
might be useful for somebody like me. And I used mapping and mapped out my all
course, which helped me then passed my exams.
This gave me the idea to create
an online resource for Students. So the original idea of Biggerplate was as a
source where students can go and get academic information but in a mind map
format where they could adapt and edit the information. That was the original
idea.
Could you give us some key numbers about
Biggerplate?
We have got
about 6.000 mindmaps hosted on the site.
Some of the
most popular maps on Biggerplate have been downloaded over 10.000 times
There is
about 62.000 -63.000 registered
members on the website. Mappers
from all over the world are visiting our website.
Ultimately you launched French, Spanish and
Italian version of Biggerplate. Why did you decide to translate Biggerplate
into these 3 languages?
We get a
lot of visitors to the website, and traffic from France in particular has
really increased in the last couple of years. There are a lot more French mindmaps and a lot
more people visiting the website from France and we really want to make sure
that people arriving on the website get an experience on the website that is
easy as possible for them. So they can find useful content and move their way
round the website and find useful content.
And in
terms of Spanish, we think if we can get the site into Spanish, this will help
us reach a very broad audience, obviously there is huge numbers of countries in
South America as well as Spain itself. They might be able to engage more easily
with Biggerplate if it’s in their language.
What are you main plans for the next months?
There are a
lot of plans! The next big project really is the San Francisco Biggerplate
Unplugged event to the end of March. It’s probably one of the best agendas for speakers
and sessions we had for our conference events. Details here: http://unplugged-sanfrancisco.eventbrite.com
Another big
project is to help Biggerplate get integrated into different mind mapping
software, so we are building an API. That will mean people can send maps to
Biggerplate direct from their mind mapping software or search for maps and
download maps from within the software straight from Biggerplate.
We also
want to continue with the translation of the website into lot of different
languages.
We are
rebuilding Mappio.com for hand drawn mindmaps, which is more complicated than
we originally thought but we are making progress, that‘s another big project
for us for the next 3 months.
Do you see some relevant trends actually in the
mind mapping software industry?
I think the
most visible trend and perhaps one of the biggest focuses for some of the
software companies is trying to keep up with a combination of cloud storage,
cloud applications and synchronization with the mobile and the desktop.
Users now
want a mindmap that opens in their laptop and then can open in their iPad or
they can open in the cloud. This seems to be a key focus for developers, and
for mind map users, as shown in our 2014 Annual Mind Map Survey (details here: http://www.biggerplate.com/reports/annual-report-2014.aspx)
Could you give some advice to users who are
beginning to use a mind mapping software?
My advice
is to find an easy situation to experiment. Rather than starting your mind
mapping by trying to write your whole business plan or solving your most
complicated problem, I suggest trying simple experiments where you can test
what works and what doesn´t.
One of the
easiest examples is to to turn your weekly to do list or planning into a mindmap
prioritizing your tasks.
My second
piece of advice is to by look at how other people are using mind mapping in
different situations, for example by browsing mindmaps on Biggerplate.
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