At my last job, a business partner was taking notes using some mind mapping software. I had never seen such software before; it got my attention. She managed to capture an outline bullet on every little facet of information that was divulged in a day-long meeting consisting of some thirty or so sales staff all of whom had an opinion about the requirements about the product we were about to implement. I was spellbound. 

The software she was using was MindJet MindManager Pro (http://www.mindjet.com/us/).

Eventually I got PDFs and Word docs of her output, and I had to help compile a legible 200-or-so-page design document (one among a zillion other reasons why I quit that job), I quickly realized that as handy as the tool seemed to be, it didn't seem to be very useful from where I sat after receiving its output. This is NOT a documentation tool!! It is a brainstorming tool, and realistically it can only be fully comprehended by the person who prepared it.

Nonetheless, there have been a few times in the last year or so that I really wanted such a tool. Actually, it was just for pet projects, not so much for work. But I cannot afford MindJet's offering at $350. So I quickly found FreeMind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page). It's Java-based, but I forgive. Some parts of it feel a bit obsolete, the diagramming feels a little unpolished, and the icons it seems to demand that you place are rather cheesy. But at the basic level, it does the job.

I came across MindApp (http://www.mindapp.com/) which costs $29 after a free trial, which is far more affordable than the $350 offering from MindJet. After completing my brain dump with it I felt like it's perhaps worth the $29 because of some extra polish and formatting features, but it has quirks, such as messed up font size in the HTML output. However, I didn't find myself compelled; the gap between it and FreeMind is tiny compared to the gap between it and MindJet's MindManager. I want more.

On a side topic, wanna know what I was brain-dumping? Well, a couple months or so ago I heard about another public database going down (this time a free TV listings service). Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, if public access databases were maintained by the Internet community rather than just one company that could shrug its shoulders one day and walk away? This had me thinking about my old Peer-to-Peer file sharing idea...

For many years, before Azureus, before Morpheus, before Kazaa, even before Napster (but somewhere close to the days of Metallica's relevance), I had an idea about peer-to-peer technology. Specifically, seeding a distributed database, by injecting metadata (i.e. XML attachments) to NNTP posts into an alt.* Usenet newsgroup that would contain IP addresses, DNS hostnames, and/or URIs, along with function metadata, describing the whereabouts of a peer service seed. This, in my mind, took hosted distributed peer-to-peer network seed hosts out of the equation; Usenet already propagates the metadata that would be needed to seed something like that.

But acknowledging that some level of organized seeding is necessary, I registered these domain names:

• DistributedDB.org
• DistributedDB.net
• DistributedDB.info

The objective for a site that would use these domain names is NOT just for P2P networks--that backstory was just an example of a trigger that led me down this path. Rather, the objective is to give people a place to either dump tiny data records, or else to proxy or alias their own network services. The service would be free but with some maximum records or limitations.

Here's what my rather small brain dump looks like.. (oh, and yeah, it's alright, I know you can't read it...)

I'll divulge more later. Need sleep.