chaos and noise

I've been following e-ink development for years, and have been watching the newest generation of eBook readers (incorporating wireless networking and a Wacom tablet stylus) with interest. So much interest, in fact, that I haven't been paying enough attention to other areas of new technology.

The Livescribe Pulse is a chunky-looking pen with a hefty pricetag. It's a real, ink-using pen, though it also comes with microphones and an infrared camera built in. To use all the non-pen bits, it requires special microdot-printed paper (sold as notebooks, journals, or you can print your own for free), so the pen can figure out where it is on the page. So, what's cool about it?

It makes digital copies of whatever you write or draw, and simultaneously records audio alongside the text. Sound is recorded in stereo (to help reduce the impact of background noise), and is tagged to the text you've just written. After recording something, you can use the pen as a stylus to touch any word or object on the page. The pen then plays back audio from the moment that word was written.

You can archive your work on your computer, and on the Livescribe.com website. Once online, you can collate relevant pages into Flash presentations. If you wish, these can be shared with other people - co-workers from the team meeting, friends from class, etc. You can find publicly shared "pencasts" on everything from making sushi to lectures on Demographics, Economics and Politics.

I really like the way that you can go back to add more detail later on, either during a meeting (if the speaker elaborates on something) or afterwards (if you come up with more ideas). You can listen and watch the playback in chronological order, often skipping forwards and backwards as you took notes. Alternatively, you can listen to all relevant audio material by touching different parts of the page. It helps to remove my biggest problem with podcasts - difficulty in skipping to the interesting bits. Podcasting works fine for audiobooks, but reviews and discussions really need a table of contents to help you jump through the recording.

It also comes with handwriting recognition software. Write "EXAM" next to anything your lecturer flags as important, and you can search your handwritten notes for all references to exam material. If you didn't have time to write down exactly what they said, you can listen to the playback at that point. You can also vary the playback speed, which is handy when making transcripts.

The Livescribe is expensive, but not as expensive as using a tablet computer to take electronic notes. It records audio, but does it in a more useful way than an MP3 recorder. It makes digital copies of your work, without the hassle of scanning pages. You still have a pen-and-ink version, in case anything goes wrong with the software or hardware. And it lets you share documents online. I wish I had one of these when I was an undergrad.