mandarine

Unsorted considerations about pencasting.

Pros:

Pencasting

• gives a personal touch but is still much less personal than podcasting and infinitely less than video-casting
• requires much less bandwidth than podcasting
• protects what you write from content theft
• keeps content more private, as it is not searchable — you can use taboo keywords without fear of invasion by Google-misled mobs (see cons)
• makes it much harder to include hyperlinks (some may try image maps).
• requires fewer multimedia skills than podcasting (some may think otherwise)
• makes readers feel as if you were sending them letters
• makes you feel as if you were sending letters to your readers
• offers you an analog hardcopy of what you publish, whatever happens to your hosting provider or your computer

[more]

Introduction

Pencasting: publication of manuscript content to the world-wide-web as scanned images of pen-and-paper text. The practice is not new, but the term was first coined in April 2007 by mandarine in Emily’s blog.

The underlying idea behind pencasting is that it can serve as a very nice complement to blogging, halfway between plain digital text publication and podcasting; halfway in terms of how much of the blogger’s personality is revealed, and halfway in terms of how much bandwidth is needed.

People reasonably comfortable with multimedia publication should have no difficulties inventing their own pencasting process. This tutorial is pencasting for dummies (well, not completely, for if you have a scanner, chances are you have already scanned stuff — if not, play with your scanner first).

Minimum hardware configuration

• a pen and a sheet of paper
• a computer with an internet connection
• a flatbed scanner (or a digital camera)

The tutorial

[more]

[more]

So there was this interview thing going on between the various bloggers around me. You got to be asked five questions and post the answers along with the questions on your blog. The fun part is that you could tag yourself: you just had to leave ‘interview me’ as a comment in somebody else’s interview post, and that somebody would have to send you five questions for you. I knew who I wanted to be interviewed by, so I just waited until Emily was interviewed by Charlotte (who had herself been interviewed by Kit, and so forth).

But you know I can never simply do a meme: I have to make it my very own. So I decided I’d do this interview as a pencast. It takes two people to make an interview; it takes two handwritings to make a pencast interview. I therefore shamelessly asked my patient interviewer to send me her questions again, but by analog pen-and-paper mail.

You are about to discover the first pencast duet in the history of the Internet.
[more]

[more]

[more]

I have decided to resort to pencasting for all my personal posts. Therefore, my blog will not show up in search results from personal details I wrote. I get to use taboo keywords without fearing hordes of trolls stampeding my way from indiscriminate search results. And it feels like I am writing a letter to my readers instead of writing a textbook, which is how personal posts should always feel.

Enjoy the next pencast, then.

Emily was recently mentioning her passion for pens, and I confessed to being quite a pen lover myself, but whined about how seldom I now use one, as keyboards and screens gradually spoliate pen and paper.

And I had an idea: although I know I would not change keyboard for pen while editing, I also know that I still like writing down the final manuscript patiently, as a remembrance of when I wrote letters. Fellow bloggers have recently set a foot in the podcasting world. Maybe I won’t. But I can start a pencasting fad. It is quite suited to literate blogs, and much more bandwidth-sober than podcasting.
So here is my first pencast, the handwritten version of my latest post, entitled standing on the shoulders of giants.