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June 14, 2005
Grafedia - Graffiti Unplugged
Slashdot is covering a story that CNN picked up off the wire from the AP about Grafedia, a new service started by John Geraci of that he bills as "hyperlinks for the urban landscape". Basically, people scrawl an email address onto the side of a building in blue paint, underline it, and then upload an image or sound file to associate with that email address. When a passing moron spots the blue underlined email address, you can send a text message to the email address, and will receive the attachment as a reply. So, it's a rudimentary attempt to create an anonymous bridge from cyberspace into meat space, which is desirable, and therefor, inevitable. John has some other neat projects which you can check out at his subfuzz website.
Although the idea is very interesting, I'm not clear that it's terribly practical. The better idea is to be able to upload text messages, so that you could download something more meaningful than a cell-phone screen short or a short WAV file.
There is another service called Yellow Arrow that looks promising. You see a large yellow arrow pasted on the side of a building with a unique code. You dial a phone number and then punch in the unique code to receive instructions, directions, historical information, etc. So, this seems like it's a little more practical than the Grafedia service.
There's also apparently a Canadian company called {murmur} doing something similar, but I can't locate them.
Ideally, if you're going to start building hooks and hot links from meat space into cyberspace, you should be able to download text such as instructions, directions, historical information, warnings, tide charts, crime data for the given area, directions to a museum, etc. Also, you should be able to download large .mp3 files (podcasts) to play in your iPod. All of this is coming, it just isn't widely available yet.
"The future is here. It just isn't widely distributed yet."
- William Gibson
Posted by Peenie Wallie on June 14, 2005 at 6:06 PM
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