I’m afraid that TopicScape is a Windows-only affair, which leaves me out.

Bill: But is the difficult to ‘splain thing just a function of us not knowing how to do it well? Examples in Tufte’s books (for example) make it clear that we can generate highly information rich diagrams that are still accessible.

This kind of relevance waswhat I meant.

Another thing they have in their favor, along with outlines and such: they make sense to a lot of people, and thus they have a lot of relevance (in the Sperberian sense). I connect things with lines that way, and it means something to people.

My fuzzy directed hypergraphs, they need acetate overlays, and connect nodes with fields instead of lines, and… well, they a bitch ta draw an splain in our weak ol 3-d world.

So points to the spidery mind map, there.

You could take a look at Topicscape ( http://www.topicscape.com ) it was designed partly to overcome the strict hierarchy limitation that most outlining and mindmapping software suffers from. And also the limitations of the 2D sheet – by allowing zooming and flying.