Early on I wasn’t too sure about inking and blogging. I still have my reservations, but through the process of writing this blog and working on WebcamNotes I can see a couple ways inking will add quite nicely to blogging:
* Blogging on the go, such as walking the aisles of a conference or other event, is efficient in ink.
* Drawing diagrams and cartoons
* Adding a personal touch, such as for a photo caption
The current problems with ink blogging (in no particular order):
* Writing neatly enough for others to be able to read your scribbles
* Typing is faster than handwriting
* Representing ink as pictures chews up bandwidth (SVG is an alternative, but the viewers have many of the same problems as bitmaps)
* Ink is not searchable
* RSS feeds are text based
* Can’t copy/paste parts of the ink as ink or as text
* Ink-based blogging tools are still in their infancy so aren’t as powerful as their text-based cousins
Other Tablet PC bloggers are beginning to see how ink and blogs go together too. Besides WebcamNotes, here are some other ink-oriented blog projects that I’m aware of:
Kunal Das: www.qnal.net/inkabletype
Larry O’Brien: www.inkpositive.com and http://www.thinkingin.net/
Julia Lerman’s Blink
Microsoft: www.inklog.com
AbletFactory.com used to have some ink blogs too.
Hmm…and there was someone out there using dasBlog and Outlook…where is that link? Anyone know?
Will there be blogs 100% in ink, such as Microsoft’s InkLog? A few. Most people, however, will still probably want to type their blog entries. I know I do.
However, all this makes me wonder if ink support is not best as a feature in a blogger client app, such as w.bloggar, rather than as a standalone blogging tool. More food for thought.