The new WebBrain hosting service is now in beta. It lets you easily publish Brains online in just a few steps. You don’t need a Web server, all you need is your Brain. Just use the File > Create BrainZip command and then upload the file at http://webbrain.com. Once published, your Brain can be viewed from just about anywhere. It’s currently still in beta, but there are a lot of features in place already.

To put your Brain online:

• Sign up for an account at http://webbrain.com/signup
• Create a BrainZip from PersonalBrain 5
• Click the “Upload” button and submit your Brain
• Your Brain will appear on your “My Account” page within a few minutes
• When you want to update your Brain, just upload it again

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Adding More Meaning to Your Brain

There are so many possibilities for classification and organization of information in PersonalBrain. If you are just creating a new Brain, the first step is to map out your ideas with Thought relationships. Once this is done, you can add another compelling level of insight to your knowledge map with Thought Types and Tags.

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Clear Your Mind. Get It Out of Your Head and into Your PersonalBrain.

“First of all, if it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you’ll come regularly back and sort through.”

David Allen, Getting Things Done

A central premise of David Allen’s Book and cultural movement, Getting Things Done, is that you can experience a tremendous sense of relief and control by moving your tasks and ideas outside of your mind and recording them externally in a place you can trust and where you will review them regularly. This frees your mind from remembering and allows you to focus on completing your tasks. Capturing and improving your thinking of course is what PersonalBrain is all about.

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From Descartes to James Burke: Breaking Things Down and Building Connections in your Brain.

In last month’s big thinker Web event, we were all blown away by the depth and vastness of James Burke’s Brain. But beyond connecting generations of Western innovation and history, his view of knowledge and philosophy for learning represents a move from Cartesian reductionism predominant in Western developed nations to what James Burke calls a “Connections” approach. This approach is also key to TheBrain’s philosophy of knowledge management and mind mapping.

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Many of our users ask if PersonalBrain is mind mapping software, file management software or something else… According to Mac|Life Magazine this month, PersonalBrain is the “most compelling computer adaptation of mind mapping encountered”. So I thought it only fitting to blog about: whether or not PersonalBrain is in fact “mind mapping software”, what exactly is PersonalBrain, and where does it fit into the array of desktop applications that you have running on your computer.

Flexible Knowledge Mapping – Networks Versus Hierarchies
Before we get into what PersonalBrain does, I think it’s important to reference some current issues with information management and your computer desktop. Almost all interfaces today, with the exception of TheBrain visual user interface, are limited to organizing information into hierarchies, where a piece of information can only be categorized into one place. For simple applications this is fine, but for users engaging in more complex business processes, it is simply inadequate. A document will have a variety of different issues or people associated with it – with hierarchies one cannot show all these relationships without multiple copies of the information.

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