Paper Bits - Request For Comments
Although I’ve got a DYMO printer, I thought I’d test and see how well Moo stickers would work with the current geohash generator.
The stickers are gorgeous, and perfect for, say, putting in the margins of a book or on a printout.
But they’re a bit small, which means that although my iPhone _can_ read them (with the free NeoReader application, search for it in the app store), it’s still a bit hit-or-miss.
(Would like to see how well the G1 handles it, with its, ahem, superior camera and barcode reader.)
Still, with a bit of tweaking, I can see this working if you wired the Moo API up to the automagic hash generator, and get a pocket full of geohash tags…
What I find compelling is what isn’t visible here: the photo was taken and uploaded with an Eye-Fi and digital camera, without any prompting on my part, except for taking the camera and leaving the camera on. (I got a twitter direct message when the upload was done, which was pretty cool.)
So the photo is pretty high resolution. I just viewed it on full size on flickr, and was able to scan the QRCodes successfully using my iPhone. That means that, conceivably, you could use the Flickr API to trawl your photostream for new photos, check for QRCodes, interpret them, and… what?
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?
Maybe there’s an existing URL that matches the (unique geohashed) QRCode, and you get that dropped into the photo as a link on a photonote?
Maybe you _own_ that domain name, and you’ve got a CMS or blog running on it. It could create that URL if it doesn’t exist, and put the flickr photo on it.
Maybe there’s text in that photo, now captured at high resolution. If Evernote can trawl through photos to OCR them and make them searchable, then, well, that’s a good proof of concept, right?
(When I mentioned this to Charles Warren, he pointed out that you could run the text against a Google Book Search. That’s another possibility.)
The point, here, is that it’s getting easy to grab image data and put it into a form that’s accessible through a data-centric API. Like Flickr’s (for example). You can do that with a ScanSnap sheet-feed scanner, or a digital camera with eye-fi, or a cameraphone, or a camera mounted above your desk.
That’s my pet obsession: getting unique, tagged data into an API, and then making the transition between the digital shadows and their physical equivalents as frictionless as possible. I’m calling my pet instantiation of the concept “Paper Bits,” and it’s what I’d like to discuss at the PaperCamp that Matt Jones suggested.
I’m not a real programmer: I’d like to create this as an open source software project, and have no clue where to start on that. So, any suggestions are welcome…
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