I just came across an awesome blog post from a novelist called Charlie Stross about two brands I love: Moleskine and Evernote (who are also a client of ours).
I have purchased two of the new Evernote Moleskines, which I hope to be receiving next week (I pre-ordered on launch day, a long time ago). But to read the thoughts of a novelist on the fusion of real and digital worlds I find fascinating. (he calls products that do this Spimes)
Here are a couple of excerpts from Charlie's blog post.
"...That is why I am currently intrigued by the new Moleskine/Evernote notebooks. Here we see spime-hood working in the opposite direction. Moleskine make high-quality old-fashioned paper and ink notebooks. Evernote provide a cloud based web clipping and notetaking service. One of Evernote's selling points is that they can carry out handwriting recognition on handwriting in photographs uploaded to the cloud. The new Moleskine notebooks represent a collision between the old and the new; you write in them, then photograph the pages using the Evernote app on your phone, and upload the images. Evernote performs de-skewing and colour correction, then handwriting recognition, making your text available and searchable. This is not the first hand-writing to cloud solution, of course. However, other systems that require proprietary paper and electronic pens (such as Livescribe) are less flexible; The Moleskine/Evernote system substitutes a generic smartphone for a specialised piece of electronics in the shape of a digital pen. And it further blurs the boundary between the physical, material artefact of the notebook, and the immaterial mutable data in the cloud."
And:
"One day the Internet will contain a model of everything around us. Indeed, most of the things around us will start their existence on the Internet as a piece of data, which will be instantiated in physical form. But not all of them; my cat is a spime, but she was instantiated via another cat! Her online presence exists solely in my vets' computer. And if I find myself writing longhand, as a way to address keyboard related injuries, does that mean that my future books will be spimes, which originated in the physical world and imploded into the Internet?"
I can't wait for my Moleskines to arrive. Thanks to Nixon Mcinnes for linking to this blog post.
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