World’s Smartest Pens Get Social

There’s no easy way to share handwritten notes in a digital format, but LiveScribe wants to change that with a new shareable web media called “pencasts.”

LiveScribe makes pens that record audio in sync with a writer’s notes and allow him to play it back at a specific moment by tapping the desired place in his notebook. The company announced free software on Monday, LiveScribe Connect, that makes the resulting pair of recordings — handwriting and audio — compatible with Adobe Reader 10.

Using the new software, users can share their pencasts through mobile devices, Facebook, Evernote and Twitter (Google Docs and email options cost extra).

Pencasts look like this:

Previously, these digitized, handwritten notes could be uploaded from docked LiveScribe pens in a nonstandard file format. But in order to play them, recipients needed to download special software.

While LiveScribe Connect certainly makes paper notes a more shareable media, there’s still one thing standing between LiveScribe’s Echo pen (as of today available in a $99 2GB version) and the note-taking pen of my dreams: It’s not wireless.

It’s a pain to attach the pen to your computer to share pencasts, even if the new software does so automatically. If LiveScribe’s engineers can make a pen that warrants its own app store, I believe that they can find a way to transfer information from paper to Twitter without having to go through a USB cable. No doubt that feature is on the way.