Have been using Compendium for the last few weeks. http://compendium.open.ac.uk/

I find it, for me, the best concept mapper, mind mapper. But, I hesitate to fire it up each day. It seems like such a big app. It is like launching the space shuttle. And I kind of lose my place in the different nodes of the maps I have going. I have a daily node, for my daily diary and notes. I have a ToDo node for the things I want to remember to get to. I have several Ruby programming nodes. I have an ebook node, local harddisk file node, contact phone and email node, and a book writing node.

I love the way it works and the reports it can generate. But perhaps its beatiful graphical layout is a drawback also? So it occured to me to take the limited text forms of rwdtinker to make a concept mapper. I will call it a Dialog Mapper. I am not sure of the exact program logic, But the idea is simple, I think. Record links and connections between ideas and information. Be able to find the ideas and trace forward and backward between links. Be able to output the information in useful ways.

This is a mashup between wikis, outliners, mind mapping and harddisk directories.

Look for the rwddialogmapper coming soon at http://rubyforge.org/projects/rwdapplications/