Evernote Smart Notebook, Where New and Old Media Unify

As you might have found in another post, I am a great believer in handwriting. Handwriting is a much more intellect intensive activity than typing. It challenges and extends the brain more. I requires greater manual dexterity, and, when done well, is much more beautiful than typing.

For my ordination registry (yes, they exist thanks to Aquinas and More), I asked for many notebooks with which to take down those things that I thought important, whether it be blog ideas, notes from meetings, homily preparation, or notes for other projects I have going on. I love notebooks as much as I do pens. It might be because you need one for the other.

With notebooks, we run into a problem, with which people have suffered since their inception, their searchability. Notebooks, even well organized ones, take awhile to be searched. You have to flip page by page to complete your search. Many people, being jaded by such an ancient form of searching, have given up on notebooks and turn to word processors or to programs such as Evernote.

I love Evernote. It is a cloud notebook with, if your willing to pay, an infinite amount of storage. I keep many notes within my synced apps on phone, iPad, and desktop that allow me, at anytime, to return to them. For awhile the app replaced the Moleskine that had been in my back pocket. There was just one difficulty. I couldn't write on it. Eventually there was an update that allowed for that, but writing on a screen and writing in a notebook are vastly different in experience. One is novel and therefore, for a short while, holds the attention of this person, but the other is cathartic and retains at least a great perceived permanence to the words being written.

(via blog.evernote.com )

I few weeks ago I heard rumblings about Moleskine and Evernote teaming up for a special kind of notebook that would sync to Evernote. Well it is here, and guys and girls I must tell you. I'm excited. It provides the best of both words the permanence of ink on paper with the searchability of the digital type.

Moleskine has designed the notebook to be read via Evernote programing through a photograph in the iOS app (soon for Android users). These photographs become whole Evernotes and enter into the fully searchable data system of Evernote.

This is where new media and old media collide and inform each other.

Once I get one hopefully I can post some of my writing and thought on here like I've seen one blogger do.