Comments on: Quite Resourceful?

By: Printing Out Online Course Materials With Embedded Movie Links « OUseful.Info, the blog…

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:37:21 +0000

[...] a couple of posts that linked to my post on Video Print (Finding problems for QR tags to solve and Quite Resourceful?) I started to ponder a little bit more about a demonstrable use case that we could try out in a [...]

By: Ross Gardler

Ross Gardler — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:18:34 +0000

About two years ago I considered printing up a set of moo cards (or similar) with QR codes on. The idea was to have each QR code link to an index of publications from OSS Watch on specific topics. We would hand these out at events instead of the full printed documents.

I shelved the idea because there weren’t enough people who knew what QR codes were at that time.

Maybe now is the time to revisit the plan.

By: paul walk’s weblog » Blog Archive » One-way bridges and interim solutions

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:03:37 +0000

[...] paul walk’s weblog « Quite Resourceful? [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:10:42 +0000

Interesting to hear your thoughts on this stuff. I’m also intrigued to hear what you mean by this being an interim solution – I’m guessing you mean the technology rather than the approach? It seems to me that the ways in which we begin to bridge the gap between virtual and real is something that is pretty permanent…however short-lived paper is, I don’t think we’ll see the back of physical objects for a while yet (see my blog post on Everyware: http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/10/18/everyware/)

In a real world context such as a museum, you’re absolutely right – this stuff would be incredibly cool. BUT the major issue of software installation is a huge blocker both for individuals and for institutions. Individuals don’t understand anything about installing applications, let alone installing applications on their mobile phones; institutions would either have to invest in devices that they rent out to visitors (and have to cope with the whole raft of problems that follow on: insurance, charging, fixing, installing..) or let users install a specific app once they arrive at the museum. It’s these kinds of practicalities which shoot a good idea dead..Until major telcos or phone manufacturers start to push these technologies ready-installed, we’ll be in trouble trying to get an adequate level of adoption.

As you know, I am trying an experiment to approach the same virtual/physical divide using mobile phones and SMS over at http://www.stufflinker.com. I know you’ve played with it a bit – but it’s essentially trying to do exactly the same as QR codes, but without the need for software. Instead it just uses SMS as the bridging mechanism. I figure SMS is a powerful approach because it is about as ubiquitous as you can get: everyone has a mobile, and every one of those people uses SMS, probably bar none.

Stufflinker works really well, but one thing that I’ve noticed with it is that people struggle to deal with the notion that “things happening here on my phone” can change / communicate with “things happening out there on the web”. I think this is becoming more and more a staple part of people’s mobile lives as adoption of the mobile web *finally* begins to embed itself into our daily lives, but it is a real consideration which still hasn’t gone away.

As always, it is both interesting (and frustrating!) that an idea with such massive potential faces more issues with the human stuff than the technological…

By: Jon Alsbury

Jon Alsbury — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:23:07 +0000

City AM (a free London daily business newspaper) use QR codes printed on the frontpage to drive visitors to their mobile site. It’s a simple idea that does actually work really well. There is clearly great potential for this in any number of marketing/promo activities. I suspect we will see more and more QR codes popping up in unexpected places in the UK as tech-savvy marketing bods latch onto the idea over the next year or so. In the commercial arena QR codes (and Semacodes) are already common place in Japan and increasingly so in north America. I recommend a visit to http://www.semapedia.org/ for any readers interested in exploring the weird and wonderful world of 2D bar codes.

By: Lawrie Phipps

Lawrie Phipps — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:55:31 +0000

I think the most important point you make is the idea about ‘bridging the gap between paper-based and digital information’. I think it is more than just A4 with a code in the margin, I see them as being on research posters pointing to forums and websites, ‘interactive’ notice boards and exhibition type data. I’ve also started looking for them in the wild and found one in the wild earlier this month – it was the washing label information in Paul Bailey’s baseball cap. Will keep looking…