Chuck Frey of Innovation Weblog noted today that in a special Tech Insert to this week’s (Dec. 19) issue of Newsweek, Bill Gates has written a column titled: “The Road Ahead: How ‘intelligent agents’ and mind-mappers are taking our information democracy to the next stage.”
Gates notes that “…advanced software and Web services can help us trace, slice and dice this information [available to PC users] in ways that were impossible only a decade ago. But while we’ve gone a long way towards optimizing how we use information, we haven’t yet done the same for knowledge…On another level, OneNote and a new generation of ‘mind-mapping’ software can also be used as a digital ‘blank slate’ to help connect and synthesize ideas and data—and ultimately create new knowledge.”
Mindjet has a great many users at Microsoft. That fact, along with the reference to "ideas and data" suggest that when Gates refers to "a new generation of mind mapping software"–he is referring to us!
NOTE: Gates’s column is not available online at this point.