OK, so what's with this papercasting thing?

Well, it started, as many ideas do, as a joke. The papercasting site was intended as a satire of podcasting and other approaches to distributing content via the web that are unfriendly to search, indexing, and accessibility, and generally conceal their suckiness within a large binary blob that there is no way on earth to evaluate prior to downloading at least one multi-megabyte file. You subscribe to the RSS feed hoping for something of value, and then overnight somebody drops a one-hour 128-bit MP3 of themselves ram"bling on about a conversation they had with this digerati or an IM session they had with the cousin of that guy who uploaded the "Mia Hi" video, wrapped around the two seconds of content that's of any actual value. So, I decided I would invent something that showed the flaws of podcasting--papercasting.

As I started to screw around with it, I realized that there was more to this than a joke. We've all drifted away from letter-writing in the Internet-enabled world we live in; I found being able to craft something on paper (well, at least scrawl something on paper) and then upload it later to be, well, liberating. Writing at a keyboard and wtiting in a notebook on your dining room table (or your lap, or the hood of your car) are totally different experiences; writing by hand forces you to slow your thought down to the speed of your pen or pencil (and focus on legibility as well). You think about each letter you wrie by hand; when you type (if you're an experienced keyboard user), the words flow directly into the electronic realm from your head without any such meditation on the form of the letters and the meaning of each word. Words in a blog or email are disposable--you can backspace them away. Words committed to paper take on material form, and carry a greater investment.

So, how (and why) do you get those hyperlinks to work?

I wanted to make sure that, like other hypermedia (and unlike podcasts), my papercasts had working hyperlinks that pointed to contextually relevant content elsewhere. After all, the real value of putting this crap online and not in some letter (or mix tape or whatever) that I drop in the snail-mail is that it's part of the web .

To do that, I use image maps that associate an area on the related image to a hyperlink. When I'm at home, I usually cheat and use Adobe ImageReady or Macromedia Fireworks to create the image maps; when I'm on the road, I have to work harder and actually take a stab at figuring out the pixel positions that describe each link in an uploaded notebook entry. It's labor-intensive. But then again, that's the point of papercasting--it's not automated.

Why don't you use one of those electronic pads that digitizes your handwriting? Or a tablet PC? Or <insert electronic labor saving device here>?

Because, that would sort of be defeating the purpose of this whole exercise. I want to be able to do this with paper and a simple imaging device; I dnn't mean to make the process of doing this overly simple. I started using a Blosxom-based content management system to publish my papercasts mostly for the sake of automating the RSS feed generation and preparing the site for a possible future move to a server-based system I could post to from anywhere with no more than a notebook, a digital camera, and a way to upload an image and text file.(Note: Now, I'm using WordPress.)

Any other questions? Mail them to me at packetrat at mac dot com