The Olympic Games come along every 2 years. One rotation sees the summer games, the other the winter games. Each has it’s own unique attributes and associations, but given that a number of us are based in one of the greatest skiing countries on Earth (Austria), we tend to be a bit more preferential to the winter games.
In our quest to keep tabs on which country is leading the medal count, we’re constantly checking the latest news coming out of Vancouver, and bustling home each night to catch the day’s coverage on TV. But who’s playing who, and which race has heats, quarter-finals, semifinals, …. finals? With so many events happening, sometimes simultaneously, it can all get a bit overwhelming.
Trying to keep track of multiple events, all at different times, as well as having a precise overview of who’s leading and where, sounds a whole lot like just about every professional’s daily schedule.
With this in mind, we decided to keep track of the Vancouver Olympic Games 2010 in a familiar format: a mind map.
MindMeister Vancouver 2010 Schedule and Results
We created the map a few weeks back with data provided by the Vancouver Organizing Committee and update it on a daily basis. Initially, the map started out tracking only the events, but as the requests for results as well as medal counts have started arriving, we’re now including this information as well.
So whether you’re tracking Apolo Ohno’s quest to become the most medaled American winter athlete (one more to go, as he tied Bonnie Blair’s record 6 medals a few days ago), or want to catch Benjamin Raich and Romed Baumann tear down the mountain, you’ll never miss a beat with our Vancouver 2010 schedule and events mind map.
Now if we could just get the IOC to consider mind mapping as an official discipline….
Late last week we concluded our User Survey 2010, receiving an astounding 4,658 responses. Before we even get into some of the results, we’d like to send out a sincere “Thank You” to all of you that responded.
As with any form of surveys, some answers are to be expected. For example, the majority of MindMeister users hail from the United States, German users taking second place, and the United Kingdom brings home the bronze podium position. In the chart below, we’ve broken out usership representing 1% or more of those that responded.
Likewise, as we suspected, almost three quarters of you are Male, and two thirds of you are between 25 and 34 years of age. The IT industry is MindMeister’s primary field of usage, however, we saw significant increases in both the Education and Marketing categories.
One question/answer that really stood out to us was the staggering amount of MindMeister users also using Google Docs / Google Apps. We figured that a number of you were using this service, but we didn’t have a clear idea of just how many. The suite of 37 Signals tools scored quite high as well, but nowhere even close to the products those in Mountain View are pushing out.
Your opinions and comments have been truly insightful, and we’ve already started working on some improvements as well as new features suggested in the survey. Again, our sincere thanks to all of you that participated!
Update: 11 February 2010 – The lucky winners have been selected and emails dispatched! Thanks again for all of your valuable input!
Printing large mind maps in a way in which they’re still readable has always been a bit tedious. Recently our support team has seen a flood of requests asking for help with the MindMeister print feature – especially when maps have become rather large – so we decided to post this step-by-step guide in the MeisterTips series.
The occasion might arise when you’d like to print a large map, but don’t want to shrink it down to a 8.5 x 11 (or A4), thereby making it unreadable. The solution? Break out the scotch tape, and get ready to print your map on multiple pages! To do this, there’s a very minor dance that needs to take place between your MindMeister printing (export) options and how you tell your PDF viewer to physically print the map.
To get started printing your larger-than-life mind map, select ‘Print’ from the options in the top menu bar. This will open up a dialogue box that presents you with a number of printing options. While printing directly from the browser window is technically possible, we’d recommend first printing to a PDF, and then using your PDF reader’s print function to send it to the printer (things just tend to work better using this method).
In the options dialogue, you’ll see a dropdown menu that gives you the option to select your preferred paper size. To print your map to multiple pages, select the ‘full’ option. Finish the action by clicking ‘Print’.
From here, MindMeister will export your map to your installed PDF reader (most probably Adobe Acrobat), and will present you with the option to, or automatically download it depending on your browser settings.
Proceed to print a PDF as you normally would. However – and this might be a setting you’ve overlooked as well. In Acrobat’s print settings dialogue, under the dropdown menu for ‘Page Scaling’ select ‘Tile all pages’. This is the setting that tells your PDF reader that you want to print the map over multiple pages.
By exporting your mind maps to a PDF format, and then using the PDF reader to select how you’d like your maps printed is a great way to make sure that even your largest maps don’t get compressed down to an unreadable format on a standard 8.5 x 11 or A4 sized sheet of paper.
About
This is the weblog of www.mindmeister.com, the online mind mapping tool. In the true spirit of Web 2.0 we've decided to abandon our anti-social news page for a nice commentable blog. There are lots of greatmind mappingblogs out there so we'll restrict ourselves to discussing MindMeister related stuff only (that's a promise!). Find out more
Thanks again for all of your valuable input!
