The recent browser plugin for automatic generation of topic maps by Lars Heuer, ANN: Finally! DBpedia and Wikipedia switched to Topic Maps! – News is one step towards catching users for topic maps with honey.
But it is only one step. True, it has reduced creation of topic maps to a drop down menu for DBpedia and Wikipedia resources, but still falls short of offering users a full-featured topic map experience.
There are a number of topic map engines, bare topic map engines. If all the reported 8.5 million developers in the world starting playing with those engines tomorrow, that is less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the 1 billion computer users in the world. My marketing department (my wife), thinks targeting promotional efforts at less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the potential audience is crazy (a technical marketing term for not good judgment).
The Mappify web service is an enormous step in the right direction.
But, the honey we need for users is demonstrating the immediate payoff without any effort on their part from this thing we call topic maps.
What to do once we have “caught” them is open to your imagination and ingenuity.