Physical E-Graffiti

Chris Heathcote posts an interesting idea about using 2D barcodes — rather than RFID — to [geo]tag places and things, which can be scanned using camera-equipped mobile phones in order to link to their corresponding digital representations. Of course, if the idea were to really takeoff, one can imagine 2D barcodes literally littering popular sections of urban landscapes.

I’m reminded of Marc Smith‘s work on Project Aura, wherein regular barcodes such as those on UPC labels can be used to search the web for content relating to those products. Marc and his team barcoded several pieces of artwork on the Microsoft campus. Placing a physical barcode on something that does not belong to the annotato puts a new spin on a number of legal and ethical issues raised by Gene Becker regarding the annotation of space, truly physicalizing e-graffiti.

One of the appeals of this idea is that it fits into [near] common practice today, i.e., it doesn’t require a great deal of new technology, at least on the part of the people who might want to read annotations of places, nor on people who might want to publish followup annotations (the initial annotators of a place will need to have a way to generate the barcodes). While I wonder how far ahead of the technology curve this is, i.e., how long will it be before other, less physical, methods of posting and reading geocoded content through mobile phones become more widespread (e.g., WaveMarket), an additional appeal of Chris’ idea is that it would be based on open source standards and code.