Wow. We’ve gone from a notebook style unchanged since Van Gogh used one to quality control that assumes you have the means to take, and send, a digital picture.

The NYC version has little old fashioned maps divided among many pages, which we probably won’t use – we’ve collected lots of NYC maps over the years which are more user friendly. But the formatted pages for making notes about “restaurants, legends, recipes”, “places, dreams, adventures”, “books, music, movies” will create a wonderful trip record for stories and planning future trips. Great organizing tool — the little boxes for each place or incident almost encourages Twitter-length entries. It almost makes me want to use a fountain pen, but I’m too heavy handed.

I love how travel is evolving. We’ll be finding our way with iPhones and recording in Moleskines. No more hotels but condos rented for a few days from VacationRentalByOwner.com. Theater tickets purchased online and printed out. Flying into Newark using VISA miles and taking the New Jersey train into Manhattan. Henry Miller and Hart Crane would recognize the basics, but everything has been upgraded. Le plus le change……….

Yeah, I don’t know how we’d go about getting ourselves listed, but I’m atually gonna investigate this. As soon as I have results I’ll definitely share.

The analog digital thing has been a subject that I’ve had rolling around in my mind for quite some time. For all of my musing about the informatic city I have a very very basic cell phone, and don’t really text or anything like that. I write in little note books, call people on the phone and access the internet from a terminal. Seems stone age, I know, but it’s how I live. Would a migration to a fully digital/mobile/3.0 life accellerate things? Would it increase my connectivity that much more? Does it diminish my sense of individuality for a more collective perma-connected sensibility? I dunno. In some ways a person’s routes through the city are so personal, but some people believe in sharing information as a way of life. Tearing down the boundaries implicit in analog-only life seems to be the mission of the digital age, but are all boundaries bad? Or do we just have to evolve new faculties?

Tough questions in this here age of collaboration.

I wonder how to get Portland on the list? I mean, Seattle?? It’s just Los Angeles with rain. Seriously, if you figure it out let me know.

The analog-digital thing is interesting. I have a writer friend who when she’s doing journalism uses a laptop but for personal writing or fiction uses a pen for the physical connection. Also an architect who sketches a building before going to CAD on his computer to work on the details.