20 Minute Trial : Second Brain

I was lucky enough to get onto the limited Beta test of Second Brain.
I decided to spend 20 minutes to see what I could achieve using Second Brain.

What I thought I knew about Second Brain before I started:

Second Brain gives you the ability to import content from Internet services such as del.icio.us and Flickr and also personal documents from your computer. With these documents uploaded it then provides an interface for you to create mashups of this content, annotated in a free form mind map.

The 20 minute trial:

I decided that the object of this trial was to try and mind map "What is a folksonomy?". You can see my collection here.

I started out by mind mapping the question - it was nice to be able to start here, but I found the mind mapping functionality a bit less than slick, and it was frustrating that I couldn't link two nodes together without making one a node of the other. Also you don't have freedom to arrange the nodes yourself, rather they default to a standard layout.

I then began to add bookmarks from del.icio.us tagged with folksonomy.
Surprisingly, I only had the option to import my bookmarks - and no options to search the del.icio.us communtiy tags.

With these in my collection space, I then began organising them and applying them to my mind map. Unfotunately whilst I could see the title of the bookmarks, that is all - it would have been great to see what other tags are associated with each bookmark.

At this point I started to wonder if I had missed the point as to what Second Brain was. I therefore started to troll through the public collections. I settled on this collection : Media coverage of Second Brain. Essentially showing all the bookmarks where Second Brain was in the media with a few other bits of information eg. publicity photo etc.

My first reaction was that all of this could be done using a quck del.icio.us search. However it suddenly dawned on me that whilst this is true, it is a visual representation of the information that not only allows you to organise the output however you want , but also save the representation, to review and add to later.

What I think about Second Brain now:

Whilst I still believe it is essentially a mashup tool with mind mapping capabilites - I now realise its not designed for discovering new information from the web like a traditional mashup, but rather to consolidate information that you have already discovered.
For me I think second brain would be a perfect place to mind map my new blog posts and presentations before I write them especially when the interface has matured a bit.