Paper is human.

Paper is human., originally uploaded by jazzmasterson.

(Please click through to the flickr photo page, as there’s information in the notes.)

Quite often, I’ll capture a germ of an idea, to be fleshed out later. That’s on a blank index card.

What I’ve done here is, I used a pre-printed, “unique”(*) geohash MOO QRCode sticker, and tagged that card the next morning. Then I dropped it into my scansnap, which uploaded it to Flickr automatically, as a private photo. Okay: captured.

I used the photo notes feature in Flickr to make the QRCode clickable in the browser. That’s something that could be automated via the API. I don’t know how to do that, yet. Also, I added a tag to the flickr with the geohash from that QRCode: this is something that could be automated, as well. Not to mention, if the geohash was made two-way (it isn’t right now), you could do much more interesting things with machine tags and Flickr’s location API than that.

Then, I used the description field to flesh out the idea on the card:

Ubiquitous Computing has the potential to be a blessing or a curse.

personally, I’m hopeful that we can use it as an opportunity to undo the attention-hogging mistakes of the GUI.

And I used the notes feature to translate my handwriting. (That’s not something a computer would likely be able to do right now, but that’s more a function of my writing.)

So, when that was done, there was a fairly rich, multi-layered document. It’s tagged, part of a few groups, part of a couple photosets on Flickr, geotagged, and you can pull a link right off the screen with your phone, if you want.

Then I used the blog button on Flickr to start writing this.

That’s a lot of friction. Or, as Matt Jones put it, it has a high drag coefficient.

What I’d like to do with the QRCode is, pull the geohash URL, and create a new blog post with it. That is, if the QRCode is actually a unique identity for that card, scanning it and automatically putting it online should create a “blog” page for it to live.

And that should happen regardless of _how_ I get it online: scansnap, flatbed scanner, or high-resolution camera with a network interface.

Or, to put it another way:

The act of adding a QRCode to any given object in the world should, by implication, give that piece of paper a place, online, for its data shadow to live.

And capturing an image of that object, with its code, should create and populate that data shadow, as an Atom post object. No friction.

Sketch. Tag. Snap. And maybe edit.

Notes or diagrams, scribbled in your Field Notes notebook, or sketchbook, or a book margin, become the initial seed of an idea.

If you decide you want that idea to be tagged and shared, you can automatically tag it, and automatically create an online space for a second draft. Flesh the idea out. Link it to others.

But the important part is, you have to reduce the interaction. Make it work like Magic Ink: use the context that you’ve provided, and use convention to create an initial stub. Which you can fix later.

If that were working, then what I’d have done here would look more like this:

1. Pull out a sketch or note. Tag it.
2. Snap an image.
3. Magic!

The QRCode suddenly has a viable data shadow, through the act of scanning it. And that’s a place to flesh out your ideas, edit it, share it with others.

How would this work? I have a rough idea:

1. I pull the note out, decide to take it a bit further. I tag it with a QRCode.
(Note: The tagging with a QRCode is itself an interesting interaction design problem, but one for a later day.)
2. I run it through my scanner, or use my Eye-Fi and camera. The scanner puts it on Flickr.
3. A bot sees that my photostream has updated, and checks it for a QRCode in the image.
* It finds a code.
* It interprets the code into a URL: http://paperbits.net/w6f024k4cetx28bcd/ and sticks a photonote on the QRCode, and adds a machine tag with the geohash and any other available context data.
* It checks to see if that URL exists: nope, it doesn’t exist.
* It posts a new atom object to paperbits.net with that URL, and mirrors the flickr photo, notes, and tags to it.

So, now, if I read the QRCode with my phone, I have a space online to annotate that object, or that time, or that space.

Basically, what I’ve done here could happen without all the insane scutwork.

Still working out how the hell to make it work. Suggestions appreciated: my email is my first initial, and my last name (DiMauro) on GMail, if anyone is interested.

(Also see: the PaperCamp mailing list.)