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11 Jun 2006
Physical permalinks
I talked with Roger Fischer of Kaywa about the QR codes he has been playing with. Basically the Q-codes are two-dimensional bar-codes. These bar-codes can contain various-kineds of data, such as an URL. Using a mobile reader, such as a mobile phone, one can extract the data and do something with. Thanks to three prominent dots in the code, the recognition process is much more easy than other codes. Roger showed various examples from Japan, where it seems heavily in use.
This approach would allow us add URL's to any physical object, by adding this QR-code. One can see this barcode as a format. The question is more what one should encode in it.
- Physical Permalink - this could should be some unique ID, which refers to an object in the physical world. A sticker with a QR-code should be placed on that physical object. And when we blog about that physical object, then we should include the same QR-code. I am not sure what should be encoded in the code, but surely there will be some ideas out there. One could see blog items about physical objects as reviews;
- Internet Permalink - the QR-code that I added to this blog-post is in fact the permalink of this blog-post. So if you print out this blog-post and forget to add the URL to the post, it will still be available. This might be useful when you start mashing with your scissors. When you always keep the QR-code with snippet that you are mashing, then you can always get back;
- Address Card - in practice the QR-code will be mostly be use as Address Card. The URL contained in the code will refer to the company web-site. The URL could also point to a product-page, a campaign-page or whatever.
The code that I used initially turned out to be wrong, the app required a serial number before I worked. There is however a QR-code generator on the Net available, which created the image I show here.