Joining up the digital dots

I’ve been playing with a great toy that I think opens the door part the way to changing the way we connect between the digital and the analog world. 
I’m not recommending you go out and buy it, necessarily. But it does conjure up visions of how we might work more efficiently. 
The gadget in question is the SmartPen, from LiveScribe (www.livescribe.com). 
It’s a pen with a small camera in it, that records what you write — well, the shapes of the letters, at least. 
You can then upload that to your computer, and it will take a decent stab at trying to convert your handwriting to text. 
Nothing too startling there; it uses the same technology from Anoto that a number of other digital 
pens use. But it also does something else, something that to me is hugely useful. 
Via a small microphone in the pen’s body, it records the audio of the conversation, lecture, interview or conference that you’re noting. 
So now you not only have your notes of the conference, but also a (pretty good) audio recording to go with it. 
Both can be stored on your computer, linked together. 
But that’s not the good bit. 
The good bit is that once the recording has finished, you can jump to any section of the recording just by tapping the pen on the writing or drawing you were doing at that particular moment. 
In other words, if the guy was saying “the world will end tomorrow at 4 p.m.” and you were writing “speaker apparently a lunatic, predicting end of world”, then tap on one of those words you’ve written and the audio will start playing at that exact point. 
How does it do this, you ask?
Well, as I mentioned, the pen has a small camera in it. And the paper is special, crowded with tiny dots in unique patterns that make it easy for the camera inside the pen to figure out where it is. 
Not just on the page, but in the timeline of the audio file. 
In other words, page, writing and audio are synchronized. 
Why is this a big deal? 
Well, for me, it means that I can jump around a meandering interview or conference to the juicy bits just by taking the briefest of notes. 
I can check I wrote down quotes correctly, or check I didn’t mishear or misunderstand someone. (Happens quite a bit, unfortunately.) 
If they’re drawing a diagram while talking at the same time, I can drawn the diagram while they’re doing it and transcribe what they’re saying later. 
Whether it’s a conversation in a bar or a conference, I’ve got an easily navigable record of what transpired. 
(And I can do all this either 
with the pen or paper, or on the computer.) 
Compare that with before: at best, a recording and some notes, with no easy way of gelling the two together. 
I’ve escaped the linear nature of audio by simply making a few notes in another medium. 
Which means there’s lots more afoot here. 
We currently spin between two worlds: The digital and the real. 
In the digital world, we’re used to jumping around to where we want to go. 
This is largely because of the hyperlink: We click on something blue and underlined on a web 
page because now we’re all used to that, without thinking what we’re really doing. 
That link could be to anything digital and Internet-connected: a video, a picture, a page, a file, a virus, a piece of audio, an RSS feed, an Internet-connected camera. 
But we’re still looking for a better way to hyperlink the real, i.e. analog world. 
This pen, in its small way, is an example of that future. 
Suddenly we’re away from the linear, forward-wind world of audio recordings, and into the hyperlink-to-the-juicy bit world of the future. 
Admittedly, there’s a long way to go. But I like the idea and I love the potential: Can’t remember what your mother-in-law was saying to you on the phone yesterday about how many spoonfuls of flower to add to the cake mix?
Just click on the word “recipe” you scrawled in the margin of your Skype phone call record, and it will jump to that part of the conversation. Can’t remember who you were discussing Sartre with and what they were saying? 
Just enter “Sartre” in your cellphone and it taps into your computer and trawls thro automatic transcription of the conversations you’ve had in the past month until it finds the word “Sartre”. 
Scary? A little. Powerful? Undoubtedly. 
The future? Not yet, but almost certainly.