Mapping the mind, and I'm lost...

For our final installment of Learning 2.1, your intrepid reporter has investigated online mindmapping and flowchart tools. And you know what? I need a map.
It turns out that I'm not much of a flowchart or mindmap kinda gal - even in longhand notes, I don't often spend much time "drawing" my ideas, so these particular tools were not my cup of tea. However, I did experiment with all four of the suggested tools, and here are my quick notes:
For folks that need to make flowcharts (and hey, I think they're fun and useful to look at, I just don't really want to have to make the darn things) we have Gliffy and flowchart.com. I liked that flowchart.com has templates - this makes things much easier for folks like me, who would rather just edit and modify an existing document, rather than create something brand new. Flowchart.com does offer a bit of a muddled initial page, though - Gliffy was a bit cleaner in layout, but I had some trouble managing my arrows with Gliffy - just couldn't make those connector lines do what I wanted them to!
When it comes to mindmaps - I guess I'm more of a brainstormer, and trying to map the storms just ended in chaos for me. But I tried out both bubbl.us and Mindmeister: and Mindmeister wins out - largely because it gives you a template to play with! Working with the template was easy - and while the layout is a little... cartoony, the ridiculously simple interface made me happy and I really appreciated the key shortcuts that were included in the demo map. Bubbl.us isn't quite so goofy at the outset, but the sheer starkness of the empty screen was a bit intimidating, although I appreciated the free demo (which didn't require any registration).