One month ago (already !) was Carto2.0, a conference organized by 3 actors of the French Visual Thinking scene :

• Francis Moaty : teacher at ESIEE, co-founder and director of the MISTE (Master in Scientific, Technical and Economical Intelligence)
• Claude Aschenbrenner : entreprise architect at Euroclear, blogger and member of the pedagogical team at MISTE
• Christophe Tricot : PhD, research engineer at Mondeca and blogger

The papers presented at that conference can be downloaded here, or viewed here (in Flash format), but since everything was in French, I am going to report a few bits in English as I believe it could interest more people than only French speaking readers

I was invited to present some of the research I had done for a previous blog entry on navigation interfaces for information sites last November (see a French version here : Les interfaces de navigation pour les sites d'information ). That included some best practices from leading French sites such as Rue89.com, Agoravox, … (see Social Media Club Paris for more info), but let's speak about what I have seen.

I have missed the opening words from Alain Juillet, the French Chief Representative for Economic Intelligence at SGDN, but was enthralled by Guy Melançon's opening plenary session. A doctor in mathematics from UQAM (Montréal), he now does research for CNRS' LaBRI and INRIA's Futurs - Gravite labs in Bordeaux. He has a background in graph drawing and has worked on pattern recognition in graphs. He mentioned a few very interesting references for people dealing with data-mining, BI and in general heavy information interface design :

• Visual Analytics (Thomas & Cook, 2006)
• Multi-faceted insight through interoperable images (Alfred Inselberg)
• KDD panel, the perfect data-mining tool : automated or interactive (Mihael Ankerst, 2002)
• Zoom, filter, analyze : the "Details-on-Demand" approach (Daniel Keim, 2006)
• and of course "The eyes have it" (Ben Shneiderman, 1996)
  

And he offered a solution to Tufte's limits adapted to Moore's law : make the maps interactive

He is also a strong advocate of crowdsourcing as a collaborative approach to looking for patterns in massive databases of data. He mentioned the example of IBM's Many Eyes experiment, where viewer's comments will reveal phenomenons and create new knowledge (see Catherine Lenglet's article on this blog last year)

We then had a presentation by Serge Guillard on business mapping. A director at Mark Company, he is a strong advocate of organization mapping (process, org charts, activities, procedures, job descriptions, …). His presentation was very exhaustive, including examples of work he'd done for Carglass and the CNES. Serge is the co-author of a book on graphical process description : free Visio templates to download here.

We then had very interesting presentations from leading French companies in the data crawling / intelligent agents fields (Cybion) and search engine / data visualization fields (Kartoo). 

Cybion was started in 1995 by Carlo Revelli (also the founder of Agoravox), and quickly made a name in search, with some of the first intelligent agents, crawling the web to gather information on a given subject (we did not have Google at that time ;-). Their presentation (made by Mounir Rochdi, founder of the first competitive intelligence community in Marocco) was on risk analysis and crisis anticipation on internet : identification, mapping, evaluation, simulation and display on a dashboard.

The next presentation was by Laurent Baleydier, CEO and founder of Kartoo (founded in 2001, see a recent article by The Next Web). He presented 3 strategies for search on Internet, very smart approaches that can help us sorting out information :

• take a bird's eye view, using semantic maps, and then zoom in on the zones of interest (Kartoo's speciality but also Quintura) ;
• start with a fixed / known point and navigate away from it (think Musicovery, Flickr of YouTube network graphs) ;
• or for those complex searches (10% of the requests = 50% of the time spent searching), use tools that recommend keywords to refine search such as Grokker or KVisu (Kartoo's new tool).

As an interesting feedback, he shared with us that most of KVisu's search users start with the list and after 1 months usage of the maps increase by 30%. This proves a rather quick learning curve that was made possible through a very structured usability  / HCI design process of the tool. Kartoo is a Google partner (they distribute their Google Mini and Search Appliance). See more info on their blog.

The last presentation I attended was Maxime Crepel and Dominique Boullier's. Dominique, whom I first met as head of the Lutin usability lab, presented us with Maxime their research objectives. They focus on tagclouds as graphical interface for navigation (and you know I am a fan ;-). Also the director of the Las lab (Sociology and Anthropology) in Rennes (see the blog he co-author with Audrey Lohard on virtual worlds as part of a research project), he works with Maxime (PhD student, also engineer at the SENSE lab at Orange R&D), whom I had already heard as he worked on "weak cooperations" with Dominique Cardon and Nicolas Pissard (now with faberNovel), and some other projects (see the website anoptique.org).

They are among other things trying to measure the level of information depth (colors, font size) that is appropriate for an optimal use.

Among the presentations I have missed (but I had the opportunity to chat with them and re-discover their work) were (non exhaustive list) :

• Guilhem Fouetillou's. He is the co-founder and President of the RTGI Group, the editor of a very nice visualization engine that was used during the last French presidential election to display the Blogopole, a map of all political blogs by affinity. See a very interesting presentation on Slideshare describing all kinds of social network analysis he did. He is now doing it for the US 2008 election :

• Jean Delahousse, founder of Mondeca, a French semantic web company, who did a presentation of cartography and ontologies.

• Olivier Nerot, founder of amoWeba and Social Computing, who designed the network navigation tool used by Societe.com to analyze company's board members, and investors links with other individuals or companies. A great competitive intelligence tool :

• Christophe Douy, from Pikko Software, editor of the Arak4Wiki solution, a complete solution for wiki editing and navigation, including EasyKube (treemaps), VisionLink (network graphs), etc… that looks very powerful and builds on works from the same CNRS Labri lab from Bordeaux where Guy Melancon works.

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I have already written about Areva's and EDF's TV campaigns, using animation and cool music to explain what they do. For the past 2 weeks Areva's TV ad has been back on air, and Suez launched its new campaign, with a little sense of "dejà vu" … 

All energy giants are facing similar challenges in terms of communication :

• Energy can not be seen
• Energy sources are critical assets for the future
• Energy production and consumption is often associated with pollution 

A quick analysis of French energy ads points to only 2 choices to help clients understand what they do, and both use visual tricks :

Animation : they chose to show us what energy can power, and how it is produced and distributed, and since reality can be too harsh, too complex, or on a scale too large to understand, they went for animation.

EDF (Electricité de France), issued that "SimCity"-like campaign a few years ago, blending reality and animation :

Suez (Lyonnaise des Eaux, Electrabel, …), recently aired a similar ad :

Areva (Framatome, …), went for full animation :

Allegories : they chose to represent the reality of energy in a figurative mode, in the every day or the founding moments of life. Allegories are often used in communication and advertising

Gaz de France is showing us a birth :

Total is  accompanying us at every moment of the day :

Those advertising strategies are seductive, but straying too far away from reality can be deceptive, especially when those strategies are not in par with companies operations and actions. In a globalized world where they are no longer in a monopole, creating a brand identity in the end-consumers' mind is a challenge for French energy companies.

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Just a quick post to share with you some info you may already be aware of … or not.

I am happy to be leaving this week-end for the VizThink conference in San Francisco, where I will have the opportunity to meet and exchange with some leading advocates of knowledge design such as Dave Gray of XPlane (co-host of this event, see his blog), Cliff Atkinson (author of the book Beyond Bullet Points on PowerPoint, featured in my Amazon wishlist … and already in my library ;-)), Nigel Holmes (former Graphics Director at Time Magazine and author of numerous books), Harlan Hugh (CEO and co-founder of TheBrain, probably the first company that create a visual information management system to search and categorize data), some graphic facilitators (Dan Rose, Christine Valenza, …) and some other keynote speakers. I will take some pictures and jot some notes to be shared with you.

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Another conference, this time in France, is scheduled for April 3rd 2008. It is Carto2.0, a conference on information cartography hosted by the ESIEE engineering school in the East of Paris. Papers can be submitted before Jan 25th (see more here). Keynote speakers will include Frédéric LeBihan (co-founder of Petillant, the first "mind mapping school" in France), Claude Aschenbrenner (a blogger I had the pleasure to have lunch with last summer and who directed me to this event), Christophe Tricot (blogger and researcher at Mondeca, a KM solutions editor), Laurent Baleydier (CEO of Kartoo, one of the pioneers of visual search engines), and some more …

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A few weeks ago was held the second meeting of the Social Media Club Paris, started by Pierre-Yves P. (one of my 2 partners at faberNovel Consulting) and Alban M. (renowned author of "L'Age de Peer" and currently working for Orange - France Telecom). We had around the table the founders of some of the most advanced participative news sites in France : L. Mauriac (Rue89), C. Revelli (Agoravox), B. Thieulin (Desirsdavenir), G. Champeau (Ratiatum), J. Jacob (Obiwi), etc… Among the very interesting things that were said that evening on fostering and managing online participation and debates, there were a few on visualization.

Technology, said T. Vedel (IEP Paris), brings some solutions and create new difficulties. Two avenues are possible:

• aggregation or large quantities of information with visualization tools (mapping, semantic analysis, synopti vision, …) to facilitate the entry in the debate
• or the use of knowledge trees (see below the example done synthesizing motions of the 2005 Congress of the French Party Socialiste), using color codes to show votes in a more efficient manner than arithmetic averages

The problem with dealing with a large quantity of information he said is our "limited cognitive abilities and cultural resources". "The image is the dominant language in politics as it has the capacity both to transport a lot of information and emotion" he concluded.

The issues that have been experimented in the political science field (where debates are a core component) are also critical to modern information websites, where a debate/discussion happens in the comments and extend the article, but also the mass of articles themselves could be seen as a debate on some topics, showing different arguments and their evolution. I am going to list the most used here, explain their limits and illustrate them with examples

• Tagcloud: I have already presented it as it is one of my favorite knowledge design techniques, because I think it is both simple and has great potential for KM. Originally designed to display keywords associated to a text by the author and readers, but also experimentally used to synthesize, or present key arguments in a text (see the analysis of French candidates political speaches by French linguist Jean Veronis). You can read more at Peter Vander Wal's Infocloud: he is the one who coined the term "folksonomy"). A free tool to create tagclouds is TagCrowd. Below is an example taken from Amazon's new Inside This Book concordance analysis feature, available on books that are part of the Search Inside the Book program.

As you can judge, this feature is not yet very useful : can you guess what the "Tipping Point" book from Malcolm Gladwell is all about ? Not really a synthesis You see that to be useful you have to trim your text from non-significant or not-significant-enough words, and probably go for a different algorythm altogether than the most frequent words.

Amazon is experimenting with various (and numerous !) techniques to synthesize texts but none really seem very effective: Key Phrases (Statistically Improbable Phrases, or Capitalized Phrases) don't return some of the words or phrases you would expect such as mavens, connectors, … Text Stats will only interest fans of bizarre statistics or adepts of Freakonomics. Only the Citations give you some meaningful data, but not really useful the way they are presented here. But I will come back to this later (with the Touchgraph tool).

There are 2 other ones you can find : heatmaps (applied on treemaps) and network maps.

• Heatmap: one of the best example can be found at Newsmap, presenting live news from Google News (via Infosthetics), used on Rue89.com, both using the Marumushi tool

Another nice heatmap is this one (via Smashing Magazine), displaying the zones of intense debate/battle on Wikipedia.

• Networkmaps: very much used for music discovery, LivePlasma's engine has been used at CNet News.com in 2005 under the name BigPicture, but this flash widget has disappeared recently (see Robert Scoble's post and a more recent one here with a link to a similar application by LinkSViewer). One of the best apps for this is TouchGraph, which has been adapted for Amazon (with books often bought by similar profiles), Google (with links between websites), Facebook (with pictures from friends) or Del.icio.us (with related tags).

So ? Some taste of the semantic web ? So far only the heatmap seems to have lasting success with information sites, the network map didn't stick so far, despite good reviews from experts (see Olivier Ertzscheid's blog). Those new interfaces still have to be improved a lot to be used by casual, everyday users, but are already very useful for some professionals in the information analysis sector, which seems to be the primary market for the editors of those tools. Adam Ostrow at Mashable has a good selection of dataviz tools you might want to check, as well as the Smashing Magazine.

We have also seen some original / innovative visualization techniques popping up here and there, some taking a social or time approach to linking and visualizing content:

• Radial graphs: some are used to display social connections in a network or community around an individual, like those influenced by Facebook's Friend Wheel and the idea of a "social graph" representing all connections between members of a community in a graphical way. For others, the idea is to represent the 4th dimension of time as a wheel, and adding the connections inside it like spokes.

But again, also it may look nice, understanding it is not intuitive, and time is still best shown … as time like in many animated graphics (see the best example with Hans Rosling's Trendanalyzer) or using a timeline (see Dandelife).

The last solutions are using 3D environments, either pure mathematical constructions such as network representations, very similar in a way to space/galaxy navigation see also the incredible Universe experiment by J. Harris, or real-life environments, based for example on city or landscape metaphors. More advanced metaverse metaphors could be developped, using diverse immersive tools, like those displayed in movies (eg Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas, and Demi Moore) and sci-fi books (eg Tom Clancy's NetForce collection of books) or the "must" in VR machines such as the "Virtusphere" shown below.

Let's hope someone will come up with better stuff than that to explore information

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I just came across a nice blog post that included an image illustrating the web2.0 and it was the perfect example to demonstrate the attractivity (in this case in the blogosphere) of knowledge design. Thanks by the way to Del.icio.us that is an incredible tool to encourage serendipity and information sharing, as I came across this blog reading from the tags of another user I shared some tags with (when you click on saved by xx other users you can see who tagged the page and then look at their own tags).

While I may not agree to all parts of the illustrations and find it simplistic, it is clean (graphically), leaves place to interpretation on my part, and did get me to blog about it

In Aysoon's blog, this tag attracted 41 comments, by far the most commented post on the blog. The second racked up 13 comments and the third only 2, as described on the blog's "scoreboard" (article à ne pas rater), by the way a nice touch I haven't found on many blogs, as well as the display of how many users have subscribed to the feed. This is probably as good an indicator as we can get of how many people have seen and liked it, and most probably searched and further talked about it. We could use the trackback feature also, or look it up on Technorati for the same purpose, or look at the propagation of it over time using Manuel Lima's tool BlogViz.

Other previous examples of such 'memes' captured in a visual way include :

• videos : the famous YouTube videos on Web2.0 (The Machine is Us/ing Us), Google's Master Plan, NYTimes video on the social propagation of obesity (Is obesity contagious?)
• illustrations : Leafar's synthesis of identity2.0 (later extended and popularized by Fred Cavazza), Visual Literacy's periodic table of visualization methods, and of course Edward Tufte's use of Minard's chart of the Russian campaign retreat

Some quick lessons to be learned :

• fuzzy, complex or frightening issues often are opportunities for visual representations (web2.0 concept, statistical analysis, …)
• such visual representations are prone to quick propagation because of their attractive and ludic nature
• when they are extreme, they get challenged (attracting comments) but with a mix of rational and irrational comments (thus effectively deepening the adhesion in the target group) as visual illustrations mostly use the language of emotions, the rational using many words and figures

These are some of the reasons why I have often used the help of an information designer in consulting missions when trying to get a team or an organization to adhere to a proposed vision changing some of their habits (see my introductory words on Knowledge Design).

Additionally, this quick propagation potential is a viral marketing bonanza, as well as an influence tool some strategic intelligence or lobbying professionals should consider more closely.

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This is the end of August and the agendas are filled with "summer universities" like the French Entrepreneur's Federation MEDEF (see their live / cross blogging initiative I have been invited to take part on the blog Jouer le Jeu, aka Play the Game), and some companies like Capgemini Consulting for which I will host a workshop on some topics I am sharing with you today, going over some of my past year discoveries and learnings.

We live in an information world and the pure volume of information available is increasing exponentially (IDC/EMC 2007 and Berkeley 2003 studies). At the same time the number of interactions (as one-way or two-way ponctual information exchanges) between persons and/or computers is multiplying rapidly, thanks to the internet revolution and the globalization of our economy. Those « connections » (permanent associations or punctual contacts) are creating a number of opportunities to solve the everyday issues we are facing with.

Thanks to new tools (creation) and economical opportunities (incentives) the distinction between information producers and consumers is not static anymore, this is what has been called the revolution of social media (user generated content, folksonomics, wisdom of crowds, …) :

• Brands need to rethink their communication with their consumers, engage in a conversation with them, build and sustain communities of users ;
• Knowledge (long thought to be limited to encyclopedias, academic books, …) does not consist in « one-off », elitist and formal products anymore since Wikipedia democratized it’s creation and sharing ;
• Managers need to take more and more decisions within a shorter time frame, often with too much data to analyze, or too much « noise » and not enough pertinent information ;
• Major undertakings do not necessarily require major investments from one individual organization as « crowd sourcing » or distributed computing solutions have allowed to search for lost individuals or to analyze large quantities of data ;

This is an overview of experimental solutions to this issue, that I have separated in 2 aspects (some products are doing both, but this a minority) :

• Traceability : new tools that keep track of every information exchange in a standardized, searchable and « mashable » format :
• search engines and crawlers such as Google (Search History, Trends, and Co-Op tools like the Tracker and Customized Search Engine), and Technorati,
• social tagging tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, and Stickis,
• and crowdsourcing tools such as VisiblePath, Amazon’s ACF and Mechanical Turk, and Inkling Prediction Markets ;
• Visualization : new tools that allow easy analysis, interpretation of data to create knowledge and presentation / sharing to an audience :
• data display tools such as IBM’s ManyEyes, GapMinder's Trendalyzer, and Swivel,
• words / tags display tools such as VisualThesaurus, Delicious' Tagclouds,  and Kartoo,
• 3D visualization tools such as Microsoft’s Photosynth, and Google's Sketchup (included in Google Earth),
• social networks visualization tools such as LivePlasma, TouchGraph, Facebook’s FriendWheel, and VisiblePath,
• and online sharing versions of presentation tools such as mind mapping, and Powerpoint SlideShare.

On the definition and etymology of innovation and creativity, the differences between information types : click here

A gallery of the largest collection of visualization techniques and use examples : VisualComplexity

For fun : a nice application that links song lyrics to images randomly extracted from Flickr, and another analyzing breakups (called The Dumpster) between people from blog comments.

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I have wanted for a long time to write down this short history. It is a work in progress as it needs some patient tracking to verify some claims and it needs to be completed for there are some more important pieces missing !!

I have ranked them in historical order :

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), England, natural philosopher, theologist, political theorist, and educator. He designed a timeline chart (1765), with bars to indicate longevity of famous people. More info on Wikipedia.

William Playfair (1759-1823), engineer and economist, is credited with inventing data draphics (time series 1786, pie chart 1801, and bar charts). More info on Wikipedia 

Charles-Joseph Minard (1781-1870), inspecteur général des Ponts et Chaussées, who is probably E. Tufte's favorite, is credited with inventing the flowchart to depict Napoleon's retreat from Russia (1861). More details on Wikipedia.

John Snow (1813-1858), physician specialist in epidemiology, used simple mapping to display statistical evidence from cholera outbreaks to point out the role of water sources (1854). More information on Wikipedia.

Unknown (Touring Club de France). The first documented apparition of a traffic sign was 1894 on the RN7 by Cannes. First designed for people riding bicycle, it quickly proved necessary to organize automobile's birth. It was quickly made mandatory in Paris (1904) and became an international standard staring 1909 (successive iterations and new signs). More info here, here, here, here and here.

Otto Neurath (1882-1945), philosopher, sociologue and economist, created a system of practical signs (stick figures) to convey quantitative information and formalized his thinking in the Isotype (1930). More information on Wikipedia.

Otto Aicher (1922-1991), graphical designer. He designed the pictograms used for the 1972 Munich Olympics. First attempts had been made at the Tokyo Olympics before but it was Aicher's pictograms which stayed as a normalized system to describe sports. More information on Wikipedia.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996), astronomer and astrobiologist. He designed with Frank Drake (1930-xx) the so-called Pioneer Plaque. A graphical representation of key current human scientific knowledge was printed on a metal plaque that was sent on the Pioneer spatial probe in search for an extraterrestrial intelligence. More info on Wikipedia.

Susan Kare (1954,xx), graphic designer. She designed the first icons for Apple Computer's new Macintosh operating system between 1983 and 1986. Those 'pixelart' icons together with the graphical interface surely paved the way for the widespread adoption of personal computing. More info on her website and on Wikipedia.

And finally Edward Tufte (1942-xx), statistician and political economist. His contribution to information design can not be yet valuated but judging from the number of the books he wrote and how he is referenced throughout the InfoViz community … More info on Wikipedia.

 For more on the history, I have found quite a few papers on the web, starting with this one and this one from the same authors.

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I am a fan of simple instructions, most of them relying on images / graphics only, such as Ikea's or Lego's. Pat Hanrahan and Barbara Tversky from Stanford University have done a lot of good research on that subject. See also the very good book from graphic designer Paul Mijksenaar Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design . Graphic instructions are knowledge design at their best !!

Last June I was traveling by TGV and there was an exhibition in the train by the well known international NGO "Medecins sans Frontieres" (with French origins : the so-called French doctors). They were explaining who they were and the type of missions they were doing and had brought with them some paraphernalia.

I was especially interested in a few of them like this "pill bag" that display very useful instructions in a unequivocal way.

Doctors need their medicine to be taken the right way, no matter what language the patient speaks, or if he is able to read or not. By using this little plastic bag, they can deliver the right number of pills and indicate how many and when a pill needs to be taken. Such a bag is cheap to produce and can be used in the millions worldwide.

Other examples of simple and standardized instructions are the apparel / clothing care instructions  I had to battle with as a marketer trying to design one that would be accepted in all European countries in addition to the US. Just because all countries need some translation of the graphic signs, most apparel manufacturers' labels are in some benign way illegal (just imagine peeling 3 or four labels in your neck …, because that's what would be required to comply with French, Greek, Portuguese, etc … language and labeling laws). The label below does for example not comply with regulations that require the information of the manufacturer's name and address, has not been translated in any local language … Technically this product could be seized by any authority in Europe (except perhaps in the UK ;-)), but end up being sold anyway.

I will come back with more on such design standards in a future post. They are in essence a universal language. See my previous post on this.

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Information sharing in web1.0 was one way publishing, static, and subject to a quick de facto obsolessence by the sheer amount of information created that would render this one impossible to reach.

By contrast information sharing in web 2.0 recognizes that information is most of the time an expression of a knowledge, which is embodied in an individual.

Finding the exact information you need (the answer to a simple question) on an intranet for example, is often a vain quest for many reasons :

• people don't add critical metadata to uploaded documents,
• the search engines do not access all databases and are not good enough to cope with natural language or unstructured data,
• and more important, you don't have on an intranet enough information because the number of contributors simply can not be large enough vs the number of readers, …

What you then need is some kind of virtual breadcrumbs which will lead you to the individual most likely to hold the best answer … for a quick phone call or email ! Such tools such as Visible Path do a good job to automatically monitor many informations exchanges (email) or other pieces of information. What you need is a system that seamlessly collects that collective intelligence and gives you an effective way to pull the answers you need from it (think visualization :-)), and I am confident a workable B2E solution can be developed out of the tagclouds, probably something linking it with visualization tools like VisualThesaurus for a drill-down in the information, but keeping a sense of weight/importance given by the size of the words.

Then of course you can add a voluntary system where real contributions can be added on top of it, from simply tagging (see Cogenz for example) to actually post "hard" information. About motivations for those 1% of contributors, see my previous January blog post for more details on how one organization should develop tools for employees to develop their reputation inside the company. For more on the 1% rule (1:9:90 in fact ;-)), see the blog post on participation inequality from Jakob Nielsen or the recent HitWise stats shown at the April 2007 Web2.0 Expo. 

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As industries get more and more productive (as measured by the increase of EBITDA/employee), we see the emergence of the knowledge worker (see Peter Drucker 1959's paper). This emergence can be measured by the growing importance of tacit interactions between workers, and as a result more and more intellectual capital (employee knowledge and abilities, in the form of information) is exchanged in a non-structured way. Tools like email, instant messenging, collaborative workspaces, allow synchronous and asynchronous exchanges of information and knowledge over a wide area (across different sites and organizational departments). But when the stakes get higher such tools are not enough. This takes place in several cases :

• the information is complex and need to be synthesized / clarified
• the targets (individuals, departments or businesss units) lack a common culture and do not share a common vocabulary
• the communication is massive and/or urgent and/or critical
• a common future vision (a new organization, market, product) existing as concept must be formalized, shared and people adhere to it

In such cases visualization has proven to be a useful approach, and the most widely used tool by managers is PowerPoint, but more recently another one has started to get traction : MindMap, named after Tony Buzan's early 90's work

Both tools have got their fans and their detractors, so let's look at the opposing parties arguments :

1. PowerPoint

• Detractors : the most famous vocal critic is certainly Edward Tufte, a recognized guru in information visualization, and his "PowerPoint is Evil" phrase is widely quoted. His thinking is developed in his book "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" and mainly states that the tool is misused, that information is buried in tons of slides, that the bullet point approach is terrible, … Other critics include the French entrepreneur Rafi Haladjian in his famous 2004 essay "Become beautiful rich and intelligent with PowerPoint", full of irony.
• Pros : Donald Norman, a famous designer who has been the head of Apple Advanced Technology Group, teaches at various universities and co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, has a strong stance against him (see Cliff Atkinson's interview and D. Norman's own defense piece). Another strong user is entrepreneur turned VC Guy Kawasaki with his 10/20/30 rule for PowerPoint
• Tools & resources : for software there is Microsoft PowerPoint of course, but also Apple's KeyNote, Google's recent acquisition of Tonic, a web-based presentation tool, and open source Impress from the OpenOffice suite. For good references and tips in addition to the ones listed above, see Cliff Atkinson's book "Beyond Bullet Points" and more on my Delicious bookmarks, updated regularly

1. MindMap

• Detractors : some recent research limit its scope and power, such as a 1998 study on college students and metacognition that indicates focusing too much attention to the tool limits content learning
• Pros : of course Tony Buzan's, a British psychologist who started working in the 70's on cognitive abilities such as creativity and memorisation and is often referred to the "inventor" of mind maps (see his 1991 book "Use both sides of your brain:New Mind-Mapping Techniques") but also in France the French Heuristic School (see the scholl website and the Petillant portal, a key node of the mind mapping community in France)
• Tools & resources : commercial softwares include the very good MindManager from Mindjet or Inspiration (more for the teaching/education environment), open source FreeMind and web-based Bubbl.us. Reference books and websites include the good portal Mind-Mapping.org, the book " " and my Delicious bookmarks, plus the following video from Tony Buzan "himself"

This post has only been a brief introduction to those tools … more in a future one !

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