It's interesting that you mention this - it neatly complements a couple of thoughts I've recently had about the same general idea.

Rather than write in a physical book and have it mirrored to my weblog, I've been pondering the opposite - creating a printed and bound copy of the current version of my weblog. It could be classified by year, with monthly chapters and per-post pagebreaks... or whatever. I haven't quite worked that part out yet, nor have I figured out how to handle comments, trackbacks, my excessive abuse of HTML comments and the "title" attribute, links (footnotes?) and so forth. I have put some thought into creating a Blosxom template set and a macro to convert markup to LaTeX but haven't yet come up with anything concrete, since I have to learn the latter first.

I've also thought about creating a handwritten weblog, or perhaps supplementing my current site with a handwritten version. You mention a blog-specific device, something like a palmtop or an electronic book with handwriting recognition (I remember your disappointment about re-reading Stephenson, but have you read The Diamond Age at all? Shades of Nell's Illustrated Primer), but I was thinking something much lower-tech and present-day. Have you played around at all with DjVu, LuraTech's LuraDocument.jpm (or any implementation of section 6 of the JPEG2000 standard) or any wavelet image codecs (EPWIC, etc.)? They're all relatively similar at the algorithmic level and in their usefulness: they can all compress a scanned page of text, with excellent legibility, to around 40-70k.

Some of my friends run very popular sites and have to worry about bandwidth bills, but I don't, so a 50k download per post is entirely reasonable. With data rates this low, writing in a real leatherbound journal and posting a scanned version is quite feasible. Annotating the original text with links and so forth could be done either with imagemaps (or the equivalent method as appropriate within the chosen file format) or, with some extra effort, by providing an OCRed textual version of the page (with appropriate links). The main stumbling blocks, then, to creating my own handwritten blog are atrocious penmanship and file format acceptance.

Tangent: I've been playing around with Graffiti on a recently-acquired PalmOS device and am really liking it. It has got me thinking about stroke order while writing English, which is odd; the part of my brain that handles Japanese was formerly completely disassociated from my deeply-buried part that handles English calligraphy. Traditional OCR, as far as my research goes, works by trying to match scanned blocks to glyphs within the bounds of some tolerance function. Would there be any value in trying to decompose a scanned block into individual overlapping lines and examining the intersections, rather like performing voice recognition by analyzing consonant-to-vowel ratios?

You might want to check out fontifier, which turns handwriting into fonts.

And yes, I have read the Diamond Age. I found the idea of the Illustrated Primer to be very compelling. For some reason there's another idea that my brain has put in the same category as the Illustrated Primer (maybe it was in the same book, or another book that I read around the same time). The idea is a computer interface that encompasses all known knowledge. I seem to remember it starting with a hologram of earth, and then you zoomed in from there. What I found fascinating was to think about what would be necessary for the computer to automatically integrate disparate datasets -- e.g. seismological data, financial data, literature, etc. There would not only be a data-semantic issue of figuring out the relationship between two datasets, but also a user interface issue of presenting all the resulting relationships in a way that would be useful and intelligible to humans.

Thanks for the link to fontifier - that's an interesting bit of code. I haven't played around enough with it yet to judge, but at first glance I think it'd need some tuning in my case. The glyphs of my handwriting are oddball enough, but at least a one-character lookbehind would be necessary to make it look "real", since my English stroke order is entirely dependent on the position of my pen after completing the previous glyph. Also, my kerning is... well, idiosyncratic would be the polite term. Speaking of text-bending amusement, have you checked out Ambigram.Matic before? It's useless but interesting.

It's a shame. Both my mother and sister have publication-quality calligraphy skills, but the males in the family all write like recovering amphetamine addicts.

Perhaps the reason your brain associated the Illustrated Primer with the Earth interface is that they are both present in Stephenson books, the latter from "Snow Crash" (please, please let blockquotes work):

[page 100 - upon entering his Metaverse office, Hiro discovers a tool]

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns-all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff.

Hiro has been thinking that in a few years, if he does really well in the intel biz, maybe he will make enough money to subscribe to Earth and get this thing in his office. Now it is suddenly here, free of charge. The only explanation he can come up with is that Juanita must have given it to him.

[page 103 - having dealt with more pressing affairs, Hiro turns his attention to the Earth construct]

The level of detail is fantastic. The resolution, the clarity, just the look of it, tells Him, or anyone else who knows computers, that this piece of software is some heavy shit.

It's not just continents and oceans. It looks exactly like the earth would look from a point in geosynchronous orbit directly above L.A., complete with weather systems -vast spinning galaxies of clouds, hovering just above the surface of the globe, casting gray shadows on the oceans and polar ice caps, fading and fragmenting into the sea. Half of the globe is illuminated by sunlight, and half is dark. The terminator - the line between night and day - has just swept across L.A. and is now creeping across the Pacific, off to the west.

Everything is going in slow motion. Hiro can see the clouds change shape if he watches them long enough. Looks like a clear night on the East Coast.

Something catches his attention, moving rapidly over the surface of the globe. He thinks it must be a gnat. But there are no gnats in the Metaverse. He tries to focus on it. The computer, bouncing low-powered lasers off his cornea, senses this change in emphasis, and then Hiro gasps as he seems to plunge downward toward the globe, like a space-walking astronaut who has just fallen out of his orbital groove. When he finally gets it under control, he's just a few hundred miles above the earth, looking down at a solid bank of clouds, and he can see the gnat gliding along below him. It's a low-flying CIC satellite, swinging north to south in a polar orbit.

Fascinating stuff. Might your recollection of an interface to all human knowledge via the globe metaphor be a blend of this and ideas gleaned elsewhere?

As you mentioned, the data-semantic issues boggle the mind. The first thing that came to mind was "what kind of type system would be needed to mesh that all together?" - I tremble to think. Faceted classification, though, would be much better suited to this kind of thing.

A thought: Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are interface porn. The stories mainly drive the description and elaboration of computer-to-human interfaces: Earth, the Librarian, the Metaverse, the Illustrated Primer, the computational parasites of the Drummers... the latter example in particular emphasizes the sexual overtones of computer interfaces.

Huh. Maybe not.

dominion human resource resource [url=http://iwolh.host.sk/dominion-resource.html] dominion human resource resource [/url] anxiety conquering math [url=http://vrqz2.iifree.net/anxiety-math.html] anxiety conquering math [/url] foot ankle tattoo [url=http://hsnx9.host.sk/ankle-tattoo.html] foot ankle tattoo [/url] brothel close las vegas [url=http://leuuv.iifree.net/brothel-vegas.html] brothel close las vegas [/url] airline in india sahara [url=http://boji3.host.sk/india-airline.html] airline in india sahara [/url] town of babylon new york [url=http://qzthj.iifree.net/babylon-ny.html] town of babylon new york [/url] nicotine and tobacco research [url=http://codg1.iifree.net/tobacco-nicotine.html] nicotine and tobacco research [/url] decor home interior party [url=http://stlvt.iifree.net/decor-interior.html] decor home interior party [/url] fish free screensaver tank [url=http://rvfpk.host.sk/fish-screensaver.html] fish free screensaver tank [/url] candy hard strawberry [url=http://adeeh.iifree.net/candy-hard.html] candy hard strawberry [/url]