The first-ever ink enabled thread on Channel9–which is only a few days old–has already drawn over 300 comments, putting this ink thread as the most commented upon post on Channel9. (To see the ranking go to the Coffehouse and select “Most Replies” from the Sort drop list.) The shear number of replies attests to the novelty of the feature and the enthusiasm of the Tablet community.
Even Slashdot picked up on the story. Although, what a difference in responses–a mere twentysome. Makes sense, because many vocal Slashdotters are using systems other than Windows and Microsoft’s proprietary ink isn’t going to be something they can use. It shows how disparate these two communities are.
Most of the /. comments are about people questioning why they’d want to even try reading someone else’s handwriting. Good point. Posters are going to have to be careful when posting in ink. If their handwriting is illegible, readers are going to complain.
Another excellent comment is about the lack of search capability. Definitely. I imagine though that if there is surrounding text, that people will be able to find things. It would be nice if Google addressed this though–it wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t however since by design Microsoft ink is closed. It’ll be up to MSN Search to solve this.
In fact, “searching ink” runs into a problem right off the bat. “What is ink?” Is it just fortified GIFs? Does an indexer attempt to recognize the text? What if the ink is just a drawing? Or what about a drawing in Alias Sketchbook? If you envisioned an online catalog of every instance of ink, would it contain OneNote files, Journal files, ink-enriched MindMaps, Flash files drawn with polylines? Of course, for starters it could just be fortified GIFs, but it would leave out a lot of other ink instances.
Layne’s been working on and off on a Tablet counter site, for instance, where among other things he wants to keep track of every online instance of ink. It’s been a bigger undertaking than he imagined–even with “little” things such as setting up the server 🙂 –but it would be a fascinating site to watch in order to monitor the adoption of ink.
As forums add ink–and I imagine we’ll see more add them as the code from Channel9 becomes freely available–keeping track and searching ink across the Internet will become more valuable. It’s an interesting problem to address.
The ability to search inked text in a reliable way is dependent upon the quality of ink text recognition… Of course, searching shapes and forms is not on the reasonable horizon, though not impossible. I will be working on a way to search C9 ink text (the recognition part is already a part of Microsoft.Ink).
As to the ink as novelty argument, well, it sure is nice to interact on forums (and blogs) lying in bed, writing free hand on a tablet screen.
Obviously, this is just the beginning. There’s work to be done in recognition, which is the technological bottleneck at this point (assuming you have ink capability to begin with obviously).
C
Charles,
It’s wonderful to see in ink in Channel9. You’ve done a terrific job getting something going and I’ve seen how fast you can make adjustments to all the queries. It’s very exciting to see this unfold.
Great job!
The challenge is that ink reco only works in XP Tablet Edition: it’s not redistributable. That makes it impractical on 99% of the sites, even for those of us who are enthusiasts. You can however, do the text reco during edit, upload the results (including alternates) to the server and then use something such as Lucene. Net to search. That’s the approach I’m taking with Weka Wiki http://www.devx.com/TabletPC/Article/27264
Larry, I wish the recognizer was allowed on non Tablets too. It makes sense to help the platform any way possible. If ink is merged into Longhorn, then it’ll happen anyway. Why not do it now in hopes of encouraging adoption of ink and Tablets too. You could handwrite with a mouse just to check it out, but you’d get a better experience with a pen and Tablet.
I like your ink Wiki idea a lot too. Great idea.