Although I’ve got a DYMO printer, I thought I’d test and see how well Moo stickers would work with the current geohash generator.

The stickers are gorgeous, and perfect for, say, putting in the margins of a book or on a printout.

But they’re a bit small, which means that although my iPhone _can_ read them (with the free NeoReader application, search for it in the app store), it’s still a bit hit-or-miss.

(Would like to see how well the G1 handles it, with its, ahem, superior camera and barcode reader.)

Still, with a bit of tweaking, I can see this working if you wired the Moo API up to the automagic hash generator, and get a pocket full of geohash tags…

What I find compelling is what isn’t visible here: the photo was taken and uploaded with an Eye-Fi and digital camera, without any prompting on my part, except for taking the camera and leaving the camera on. (I got a twitter direct message when the upload was done, which was pretty cool.)

So the photo is pretty high resolution. I just viewed it on full size on flickr, and was able to scan the QRCodes successfully using my iPhone. That means that, conceivably, you could use the Flickr API to trawl your photostream for new photos, check for QRCodes, interpret them, and… what?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?

Maybe there’s an existing URL that matches the (unique geohashed) QRCode, and you get that dropped into the photo as a link on a photonote?

Maybe you _own_ that domain name, and you’ve got a CMS or blog running on it. It could create that URL if it doesn’t exist, and put the flickr photo on it.

Maybe there’s text in that photo, now captured at high resolution. If Evernote can trawl through photos to OCR them and make them searchable, then, well, that’s a good proof of concept, right?

(When I mentioned this to Charles Warren, he pointed out that you could run the text against a Google Book Search. That’s another possibility.)

The point, here, is that it’s getting easy to grab image data and put it into a form that’s accessible through a data-centric API. Like Flickr’s (for example). You can do that with a ScanSnap sheet-feed scanner, or a digital camera with eye-fi, or a cameraphone, or a camera mounted above your desk.

That’s my pet obsession: getting unique, tagged data into an API, and then making the transition between the digital shadows and their physical equivalents as frictionless as possible. I’m calling my pet instantiation of the concept “Paper Bits,” and it’s what I’d like to discuss at the PaperCamp that Matt Jones suggested.

I’m not a real programmer: I’d like to create this as an open source software project, and have no clue where to start on that. So, any suggestions are welcome…

There really is too much to summarize in a single post, but here are some of the highlights as I saw them.

People

I had the honor of meeting and befriending some amazing folks. A partial list:

Jennifer Magnolfi, Matt Jones, Timo Arnall, Matt Cottam, Michelle Malott, Chris McCray, Charles Warren, and probably a half-dozen others whose contact data I haven’t pulled out and reviewed yet. (Sorry!)

We managed to spend most of the summit sitting at a table in back, with half of us working on their presentation for the next day while listening to the presentation, and the other half listening to the presentations and exchanging (occasionally snarky) comments on twitter.

The GooglePhone’s internal compass and its ability to do an augmented-reality view with it, using Google Street View, was the technological nerdgasm of the weekend.

PaperCamp

The highlight of the weekend, for me, was meeting Matt and Timo, and getting to talk about paper as prototype spime.

(It was a bit gratifying, when meeting Matt, to be greeted with, “Oh, you’re that guy!” Admittedly, that’s usually what people say when a locally infamous eccentric shows up at a party, but it was fun nonetheless.)

Timo made the insightful comment that the idea of just attaching a URL to paper is kind of broken, and we need richer and more interesting interaction patterns. He and I agreed that the usability of QRCodes is quite poor as they stand, but they are a printable, inexpensive analog for passive RFID and touch interaction in some ways.

Matt percolated a bit, and came up with the idea of having a PaperCamp event for like-minded people to explore what can be done with printable protospimes.

Matt’s suggested topics:

• Way-new Printing
• Protospimes
• Ingestion/Digestion/Representation
• Bionic Sketching
• Folding/Structure
• Paper’s Children

(“What would Paper’s Children be,” I asked. “That’s the point, I’m asking you,” Matt said.)

(I have some ideas about that, but let’s save it for later.)

Memes!

Some ideas that got bounced around, from talks, hallway discussion, and drunken ranting:

• Personal Informatics
• Game Mechanics for motivation and change
• Manatee Rape Waivers – band name, or legal necessity?
• The lack of personal fear in a welfare state (Norway)
• Warren Ellis won’t actually eat your heart if you buy him a beer.
  (Matt claimed this, but I’m still skeptical)
• Obama as the president in Independence Day
• RFID fields as physical objects
• Wii Fit and Nike Plus –- and how you should be able to change and record the messages in both
• Will the FUBAR security fiasco in Mifare RFID chips harm NFC adoption? (Yes.)

So, in other words, we made as much sense as you’d expect.

On the whole, as I said later, it was simply refreshing to show an example of my thought experiments and for people to not look at me like a dog that’s been shown a card trick. Worth the price of admission right there.

Thank-you’s

I really have to thank Dave for inviting me, and of course the summit organizers, Michelle Bauer and Mary Craig for allowing me to attend. Also, everyone else for being generally awesome.

What’s next?

Well, I just got this, from Matt Jones:

@paperbit 15.24, restate your assumptions.

Sounds like a good place to start.

I’ve come to the hypothesis that all engineering problems can be solved through the methodical appliance of yellow stickers.

It’s amazing how much you can talk and talk, but when you finally draw it all up and put it on the wall, and rearrange a bit, suddenly things just become clear.

Amen.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards, and this enabled him to create wonderfully nonlinear books. One of my favorites is Pale Fire, a book that manages to tell three stories at once, written as the critical analysis of an autobiographical poem.

If that description sounds about as much fun as being repeatedly punched in the balls by circus midgets while alphabetizing census records, I assure you that it is anything but.

In any case, I’d like to take Pale Fire (which is sort of about, and definitely revolves around, an autobiographical poem written in pencil on index cards), and make an edition of it with the poem printed both traditionally (in the first section), and also on index cards. These would be spread through the pages of the book, which is ostensibly a criticism of the poem itself (although it isn’t really, and the book should certainly be read to see why).

What makes the idea seductive to me is that you could easily use semacodes to link the cards (and individual notes on the poem’s stanzas in the “commentary” pages) to an online, networked version. I imagine it as being like a blog, with wiki-style comments.

If done correctly, the result would be a networked book, on paper.

Why?

Well, since there are many possible ways to read the book, and no real authorial word on which is the “true” story, the reader would be invited to join the commentary and argument over the book. This might provide a different way of engaging the story than reading and even discussing the “dumb” paper version.

In addition, the paper itself provides affordances for physical annotation, offline reading, and mixed media, with the additional interest of the poem’s “original” itself being provided along with the printed version.

(Incidentally, this would also fulfill a long-standing geek dream of mine: I’d love to be able to trackback-ping a passage from a paper book I’m reading, from my blog. And see the trackback when I reread the book.)

It would also be a wonderful interaction- and graphic-design problem to solve. With index cards. And data shadows.

The concept is an attractive nuisance. I really can’t let it go, but I really have no idea how to go about getting the rights to do so. Pale Fire is, after all, still under copyright. And I’m not a printer, by any means. But damn, I can’t let the idea go.

This is what happens when I empty out a month or two’s worth of photographs from my camera at once…

(I envision my inner design geek as a little bug, with spectacles and little markers clutched in its multifarious legs, bluefoam clinging to its carapace by static electricity. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s all the coffee I’ve drank today.)

I love S&W’s feel for the way networks, mobiles, and the web connect us together, separate from the specific interaction idioms we’re resigned to. They correctly focus on what it is we’re doing, rather than the tools we use to do them. It’s a neat trick, and it lets them come at problems from angles you wouldn’t think of if you were thinking within the GUI/Web/AJAX box.

Social Printing

Example: Matt re-imagines the printer as a social letterbox.

If my desktop printer understood the lessons of social software and Web 2.0, it wouldn’t be attached just to my computer or local network. It’d be accessible by my closest family and friends, too, regardless of where they lived. These people are my primary network, the folks for whom I’d put my neck on the line, and of course I’d let them use my paper and toner, just as I’d happily leave them with my house keys.

I like the idea, but personally don’t think it goes far enough.

For one thing, Matt envisions this using thermal paper. From someone who’s really into the feel of physical interactions, that surprises me; thermal paper is horrible stuff to handle. It just feels terrible in the hands, and it’s painful to read. I’d prefer it if the printer used something like, oh, say, 5×8 index cards. That would put your output onto things you could easily pick up, shuffle, and post up on the wall (if it’s something you like), or shred (if not).

Why not take the “fax machine” concept even further and integrate a document-feed scanner into it, as well?

Finally, you could very easily fix this up so that a digital copy of each printout is stored locally on your machine, and have that, along with some metadata, linked to the printout via visual marker recognition technology, giving each printout a data shadow. Wave the printout at the webcam in your MacBook, and you’ve got the sender (and maybe their public-key signature for verification), the original URL or file, and anything else that might be handy, ready to be blogged, posted to Flickr, saved in del.icio.us, or emailed.

Fixing Paper

What I find interesting isn’t replacing paper with the computer (or to put it another way, “paperlessness” is hardly a useful design goal, any more than “blue” would be). And it’s certainly not a luddite rejection of the computer in favor of paper. What is interesting is being able to start on paper and transition easily to and from digital media and paper, without regarding either as a “final” goal or medium.

Paper has some wonderful interaction properties: you use it with both hands; it’s the quintessential calm technology; its input is modeless; it can be endlessly annotated, dog-eared, scribbled on, folded into origami; it’s archival, whereas digital formats can be distressingly ephemeral; it can easily be shared with people in meatspace, without the messy interaction problems of screen sharing, video conferencing, and version tracking; and finally, it’s reliable and predictable – you know what you’re going to get when you manipulate paper.

Paper has disadvantages, too: it’s bulky; input is slow compared to typing; you can’t search it; it’s highly linear (in book form) or you can’t impose a good structure on it (in index card form); it’s really hard to hyperlink; delivery is a pain, requiring fax machines, FedEx, or Rube Goldberg-esque scripts linking paper scanners to email.

What I love about the social letterbox is its potential as one way to “fix” paper. It uses paper as a transitional format, which is easily shared with others in meatspace.

What I’d like to see more thought into, is what happens with the paper once it’s out of the printer. At the moment of printing, there’s a lot of rich metadata to tag the paper with; how can that be used, in an interaction scenario, to make the paper easily transition back into the computer?

How would you share it with others, in meatspace? Via email? And, if you were handed a printout from a social printer, how would you blog it, if you wanted to? Wouldn’t that be a great way to collaborate and share sketches, across a large distance?

This is what I mean by separating networked connection from the idioms we’re used to; with the advent of physical computing tools such as Arduino and Processing, sketches like this aren’t (necessarily) idle speculation. You could probably build a version 0.1alpha of something like this in an afternoon, with the right tools.

So I’ll continue to Pulse Laser for more of this stuff. And might get around to actually building something along these lines myself…

But fear not! I bring gifts.

Via Core 77, we find Indexed, a collection of amusing sketches on index cards.

And that’s all I got. Sometimes, life’s like that.

There’s really very little on the web that can beet Flickr for sheer, utter geekery. Lifehackers and organizational fetishists and headcases from around the globe have taken full advantage of the medium, and there are some beautiful things to be found.

A not-even-barely-complete list of Flickr groups, and pretty pictures, may be found after the cut.

The Moleskinerie Flickr Group

Devoted to sketches, doodles, and art in, around, and using Moleskine notebooks.

The Getting Things Done Flickr Group

You never knew there were so many ways to use index cards.

Origami Tessellations

This has nothing to do with organization, but it’s just so damn pretty.

Annotated Things Groups

The notes feature on Flickr is just a wonderful way to layer detail into an image, and use it to tell a story. Dave Gray has created a set of groups based around this premise, and they’re all great.

• Annotated Workspaces

  

• Annotated Notes and Sketches

  

Wave your mouse at the stuff in those pools.

Tea Sketches

Put a teabag on an index card, long enough to make a stain.
Now, draw something around that stain.

Inspiration Boards

I love these glimpses of other peoples’ internal landscapes, as reflected in their work environment.

It’s trite to say that there’s no limit to what you can find in Flickr, as inspiration for your own low-tech stuff; if you were an immortal who never slept, and had nothing else to do in life, it’s conceivable that you could see it all.

But given our limits in attention and time (not to mention the painful effects of sitting at a computer all day), it’s pretty clear that there really is more than you can ever actually consume.

So, while this is hardly the sum total of what I’ve been aware of on Flickr, if there’s something you don’t see here and I haven’t mentioned, drop me a line. I’d love to see it.

(Also, if you suspect that this whole post was just an excuse to noodle in Flickr and play with TextMate’s new image upload and blogging tools, then you’re absolutely right.)

Post cards,
originally uploaded by dgray_xplane.

Dave Gray got a document-feed scanner, and he’s been using flickr to manage the index cards he uses to sketch on.

(So jealous.)

The photoset is worth checking out if you’re the type of person who likes glimpses into the creative process. It’s especially nice to get some insight into the process of someone with so much experience in visual communication.

The big insight is that I’ve not taken responsibility for my adult existence, and instead have been rather more indulgent of my childhood impulses that I’ve realized. And while I’m not a parent, I can perhaps repurpose the mentality to create my own “sense of mission” toward myself: create stability, security, and sanctuary. It’s also good practice for being a parent someday.

This fits with a lot of things I’ve been thinking about, lately. I think Dave may be discovering an unexpected result of his time tracking and task management. And it’s an effect that his Printable CEO series of self-reporting tools seem to augment. And, as is often the case, I have a note to myself on an index card about it.

(Scan and more blather after the cut.)

That is, when you start tracking your actions, you inevitably become more conscious of how you are living your finite and irreplaceable life.

It’s usually not comfortable information.

Like Dave says, when you’re living alone and working from home, you can stay up late and act irresponsibly, because your adult self isn’t watching. It’s all good, as long as you meet deadline, right? Who’s going to tell your inner adult supervision what’s going on, it’s too busy worrying about the work stuff to take control of the life stuff.

Good productivity tools can give your adult self regular report cards, and if you care about how your (mortal, fleeting) time is spent, reading those report cards can come as a real shock. It surely did to me.

It’s like simultaneously being the reprobate child and the outraged parent when, all of a sudden, a pile of bad grades, truancy notices, and tardy slips are found in the shoebox under the bed. You have to face up to what you’ve been up to, and you have to take responsibility for it.

That’s when you start to notice things.

There is a cost to slacking off for the afternoon and whacking the spacebar on MetaFilter like a demented pigeon in a Skinner box, instead of cleaning the bedroom or kitchen, or processing your inbox.

There is a cost to leaving the dishes in the sink. (Sometimes, a literal cost; ever order pizza because the pans to cook dinner were buried under a pile of dishes? Am I giving away something I shouldn’t, here?)

Many Getting Things Done folks find themselves feeling like they’re “growing up,” once they’ve been tracking their to-do lists and performing the weekly review for a while. You can’t help but see what it is you’ve been checking off, and what you haven’t been.

GTD gives you both a “front end” view of what you think is important (a whole project list full of the things in your life you have decided must be dealt with), and the back end (what have I actually accomplished this week)?

And tools like the Emergent Task Timer enhance that effect, on the back end. It gives a good focus on where your time has gone, where GTD gives you a focus on what you’ve accomplished. These are complementary benefits.

(Sometimes, it’s more like being punched in the gut, depending on how much I’ve actually gotten done.)

As an experiment, I’ve taken to dropping my completed Printable CEO sheets into a tickler file, for a week ahead, so that I can see how I did last week. Every Tuesday morning, I see the last couple of tuesdays, and I get to see how I spent my work time.

Man, does that bit of self-knowledge intrude on whether or not I decide to check my RSS feeds. (He wrote, guiltily glancing at the clock.) And that’s a good thing.

Presenting, the ghetto index card bleachers:

No modification necessary.

Hey, I bet zip disk cases would work even better….