The papercasting weblog (example entry screencap above) is an attempt to blog by writing messages with pen and paper and then scanning and uploading these JPG images to form a blog. The blog entries consist of scanned JPG images, however, the titling of the entries and the links along the right-hand side, the navigation, blogroll, etc are all traditional text links. What about the comments:

The challenges and/or concerns that I see with this type of weblog are:

1) why go half-way? If the point is to make it entirely an image-based blog, then why aren’t the titles as images, the links images, blogroll, etc?
2) what about the sight-impaired? Without ALT tags on the images or in the XML feeds, they are unable to get involved.
3) what about the search engines? Most traffic a blog receives is from friends, family, associates, competitors and search engines. Search engines might find the blog itself — and in fact if you Google “papercasting” you’ll find this blog, but what about the individual entries? Nope. It’s not search engine friendly. If search engines searched the meta data of the photos then there related information and keywords could make this type of project keyword-friendly.
4) Why not just a Tablet PC for this? I am sure using a Tablet PC only to blog in ink form is something that has been done (and maybe some reader(s) will point me in the comments to specific examples) and it probably already has a name too: Tabletcasting? Tabcasts? Tbcasting?

Ok, should I send the gist of this response to papercasting? I wonder if using a Tablet PC I could make it look like it was written on a scanned piece of paper? If you are really bored or really curious about this concept then keep reading.

My experiement using a Tablet PC to (somewhat) resemble being written on a piece of paper:

1) open OneNote and change to blue ink
2) write the note and then take a screen capture of the background.
3) use photoshop to compress at a very low resolution so there is digital noise. Here’s the result of this two minute effort:

NOTE: some additional and much better tweaking could be done to make the ink look more realistic (perhaps a custom black ink that’s more gray/black and faded). The background could be changed to a crumpled page by taking a piece of paper and crumpling it and then using it as a background layer and layering the Tablet PC text over the crumpled paper.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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