A Cool Tool -- Cohere

This one comes under the heading of 'sensemaking'. (Image link for Facebook view.)

Cohere is a visual idea mapping for "trying to construct coherent patterns from the ocean of information" available online. It goes way beyond familiar social bookmarking tools and tag clouds and makes possible the development of idea clouds which can have one or more websites associated with each individual idea.You can also install a Firefox plugin so you can add to your web of ideas as you browse.

Cohere allows you to weave relationships among the tags and phrases. As you build the connections a large web grows that can be viewed as dynamic a big picture. As the web grows, you can focus in on just one 'corner' or hub and filter the kinds of related ideas you want to see. The ideas can be viewed as a list, a timeline, or by geographic location on a Google map. Click the 'Connections' view to see the dynamic web.

This seems to be a sister project of the downloadable dialogue mapping tool -- Compendium.

I haven't tried it yet, but I've been thinking about how this could surpass Twitter as a conference backchannel tool because the ideas are archived and connected. I'm going to work on my own math wiki page and see if I can create a new web of ideas and websites for my next presentation. I'll post it here when I've finished. In the meantime, here's the link to the video introduction (link for Facebook view).



Here's a sample about what climate sceptics believe based on this BBC article by Richard Black (2007). It may load a little slowly, but it's worth a look.