ImindIsaid

Galen on Imindi July 2008

Imindi is a linguistic connectome of the human mind. Imindi's underlying database, the Mindex, has never existed in this form before. As we hint about in the tutorial, Imindi has just begun. The database you are helping to build will become a powerful force in the future. A force for learning and change.

Imindi already has a Like Minds recommendation engine where users can get connected dynamically without resorting to outside e-mail. And an "under the hood" semantic engine that pulls out known nouns and entities from your notes and resources, and automatically populates your Think Tank with those nodes for you to link up at your convenience in your network of thoughts (Journey).

We will be developing specific tools for various professions so that users can easily create and build an integrated think tank environment for their needs. For example, a teacher will be able to set up a group of Like Minds that include their students, with a central topic Journey and a linked essay or book, and resource material all attached to the framework of the lesson and goals. A researcher can make a hypothesis tree with her colleagues and attach all the relevant literature. Our goal is to make Imindi your best source for intellectual growth and enhanced memory.

What is it all about, you might ask? Where is it going? We don't know the future, but we are helping to build it. And one thing we are sure of is that we as individuals will once again take a central position in defining what is valuable to our lives. Search finds information, but only you can find meaning.

Imindi is a platform of platforms: Seamless thought management is the idea that you could eventually navigate 3-D textual and visual space that is also embedded with image, book and video data, all searchable and linked. Your Imindi Journeys provide the scaffold that holds all of your other web resources together. The links themselves between thoughts become important quantities in the Mindex, measured by popularity, but also novelty and quality, and future users will be able to highlight certain paths in the network according to their Journey filters. Physical resonance will be programmed into the linkages just like the synaptic networks in our brains. This will allow the network to dynamically shift its emphasis and attention according to need and interest. Perhaps more importantly, old links that are not used will not strengthen. But any link that exists could be the one you need, and we will help you find it. At many levels, the way we think will be incorporated into Imindi.

Imindi is both avatar and agent: The thought patterns in your Journeys will become a powerful search tool to find relevant information across all of the other platforms you use. Your Journey patterns will also provide a useful filter against many existing platforms like Delicious, Flikr, YouTube, Facebook, and others. You will be able to put two terms into Imindi Search and find the middle idea that most closely links them together. We will be continually working to integrate Imindi data with the rest of the web. If the internet is about hyperlinked documents, Imindi is the new evolution to hyperlinked thoughts.

Like others, we support freely available information as a force for good, both for individuals and for society as a whole. But the most valuable information is the kind we create ourselves, our thoughts. Please help us build Imindi.

Join my Imindi Inc think tank on Imindi

The Intelligence Augmentation Trajectory

I think that ultimately Bill Gate`s vision of the importance of having the personal computer on every desk is more important than Google`s vision of "organising the world`s information and making it universally accessible and useful" because Bill`s vision talks about the "Why" and the "Why" is personal. Windows is the peak of Microsoft`s success in realising its vision. Steve Jobs and Apple has also had great success in this area in the realm of using the Mac and the MacOS to enhance individual education and individual creativity. At this point of the trajectory the business model was a paid software model or a paid hardware model or both.

Its all part of the trajectory of augmenting individual intelligence. This trajectory was envisaged by Vannever Bush and his memex, was expanded on by great pioneers such as Douglas Englebart, Ted Nelson and Alan Kay. 

Now whilst, undoubtedly, Google and the search engine have greatly amplified individual intelligence, there is sence that the information is more important than "I" and hence by extension more important than "Us."

Recently with Web 2.0 we have seen the rise of the "Social Network" where the power of the internet as a social communication tool took on a new expression. MySpace, Face Book and Linked in seem to be riding this wave to success. At this point of the trajectory the business model has been an advertising model where it makes sence to give the information away for free in return for building media asset value that can be sold to companies.

The next stage of the trajectory will be about reclaiming the value of the mind of each individual and co-operating to create new intelligence - The Mind Network. Hopefully, Imindi will be able to ride this new wave to success by providing the  right tools to help enhance individual and collective intelligence at this point in the trajectory.

I am also convinced that as a new economy based on "mind assets" starts to emerge people will expect to be be paid for access to their mind - I am not sure however, whether this will mean that people will be expect to be paid for access to their resources, I think that more likely these resources will become "branding" for their mind asset. That is to say that are made publicly viewable on the internet will be part of an individual`s "Mind Branding Model" whereby they promote their underlying intellectual capital that they will contribute to projects in return for employment/consulting contracts and equity.

For more information on "Mind Asset" please read this wonderful series of posts by Yihong Ding at Thinking Space.

Join my Augmenting Intelligence think tank on Imindi

Example Embedded Map

What is Imindi?

What is Imindi?

Imindi is the best online application in the world to help you collect your thoughts and to expand them in new and exciting directions by exploring and connecting with the thoughts of other Like Minds.

We have built a next generation "collective intelligence" social networking platform for thinkers and knowledge professionals to connect their minds, share their thoughts and ultimately create knowledge.

At its core Imindi is a "Thought Engine"  because it is an engine that augments the way that we think of new ideas, concepts and questions as opposed to a Search Engine which helps you find information or answers to questions that you have already formed in your mind.

On a practical  level Imindi will help you to  express your own thoughts and expand them by connecting your thoughts with others. In some ways its a bit like the popular web application  Flickr except instead of using it for collecting and sharing your photos you use it for collecting your thoughts.

The Imindi Thought Engine enables you to input your Thoughts and the semantic connections between them (Why, What, Where, When, Who, How) in a naturally radiant fashion with one thought radiating outward to one or many asoociated thought that themselves radiates outwards towards other thoughts. The interface is essentially a visual map of your mind what we call a "Journey" here at Imindi.

Each Journey has its own theme that you choose and once you have chosen a starting thought you can travel to wherever your mind takes you.

You can also explore the thoughts of other people using Imindi if they have shared them with you or made them public and if you find that you like their thoughts then you can connect your Journey to theirs - an act which quite literally expands your thoughts and takes them in directions that you might not have taken on your own.

Take a look at our Thoughts about the "Thought Engine" within the context of our Journey about the "Semantic Web" http://www.imindi.com/maps/3197143-thought-engine

It might be interesting to note for some people that Imindi is one approach to realising the dream of building a Semantic Web but whilst much of data will be encoded in machine readable semantic web formats like RDF, OWL and Topic Maps which should certainly help make machines smarter, our goal is to provide a platfom that will augment individual and collective human intelligence.   

On top of the Thought Engine, Imindi has built and continues to build new and useful applications that enable you to attach the information in your life to your thoughts such that you can create a "Memex" filing system for your digital information that works in in the naturally non linear associative way that your mind does 

The first applications that have been built upon the Imindi Thought Engine are:-

1) Imindi Write ( an online word processor where you can produce "Essay" documents with key words marked up with links back to your Journeys on Imindi)   

2) Imindi Search ( A meta search engine that enables you to use the Thoughts in your Journeys as queries to all the major search engines)

3)Imindi Thought Agent (A recommendation engine where Imindi looks at the Thoughts in your Journeys and suggests related thoughts and like minds)

4)Imindi This ( A book mark that enables you to link websites of interest directly to your thoughts)

Our aim is for Imindi to integrate with as many of your favourite  third party applications and we are in discussions with third party application owners and developers to make this happen. As a start we have integrated with Del.icio.us so that you can immediately tie all your bookmarks stored on Del.icio.us with your thoughts on Imindi. We are developing plug ins to enable you to integrate links back to your Imindi thoughts into all blogging platforms and into all documents that you publish on the web

The Vision and Mission of Imindi Inc

The Vision of Imindi Inc

Imindi Inc: a company that Is. We think, therefore we will continue to exist

We want to help ensure that the future can and will improve the human condition and the health of the planet.

The Mission of Imindi Inc

We intend to build a platform that help human beings to create knowledge and share wisdom by using our minds to think and to feel in a borderless and holistic manner.

To this end we have created Imindi which is both a tool that Thinkers can use and community that we can join.

Its architecture is designed to facilitate a more intuitive, subjective, borderless and holistic thought process that is always open to new possibilities and optimistic about creating a brighter future.

Like an Aspen grove, the content in Imindi is linked below ground, in the roots, to form a powerful whole. A working network that has not existed before.

Mouse neurons stained with green fluorescent protein, overlayed on an Aspen grove