Pezholio

1 | Andy Mabbett

November 9th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

I’ve been banging on about this for ages – why don’t people have barcodes on their business cards, leading to page with a downloadable hCard or vCard version of their contact information?

Why don’t the “closed” notices in shop doorways have them? And signage at the entrance to parks and nature reserves?

2 | John Fox

November 9th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

That’s a great idea, I really like it and can see all sorts of applications for it, particularly in a local authority context.

In the early days of its usage, however, you would have to include more than just the barcode. In order to promote take-up (internally) and take-up (externally), there would need to be some form of explanation of the purpose of the ‘funny graphic’ including what types of device can scan it and why they should (the benefit).

You might, for example, do something like this:

[BARCODE IMAGE] What’s this? Visit http://www.xyz.gov.uk/barcode to find how to access this information from a portable device.

3 | Tony Piper

November 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm

Stuart, you are amazing. I had no idea that Google had a QR-generating API. I suggest you include a ratemyplace.org.uk/ here which gives information about specific premises and also explains how to read QR codes on the move. Looking forward to that urban spoon tie-in too! ;O

4 | Tony Piper

November 9th, 2009 at 5:43 pm

Can you also do this with planning notices too? That would be great!

5 | Tony Piper

November 9th, 2009 at 5:51 pm

Just a sideways thought – it would be great to show the year of inspection in large bold type… to prevent dodgy restaurants from showing their old more favourable certs…

6 | Adrian Short

November 9th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

Good idea to use barcodes for this. Every printed URL whether on a document or a poster is a potential candidate for a barcode. And like URLs themselves were not so long ago, the more people see the more they will learn to use them. I recommend using a URL shortener like http://bit.ly which makes the barcodes simpler and therefore easier to scan.

7 | Andrew Beeken

November 9th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

Oh you top man! I’d wondered where you generate those funkeh barcodes from I have a project that could very well make use of this…

8 | Sharon O'Dea

November 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm

Smashing idea, Stuart.

One question: does the Google barcode generator produce a unique barcode each time, or (like bit.ly) a barcode for each URL which is repeated each time it’s entered?

If the former, it could enable the organisations that use them to monitor the effectiveness of printed materials – by using different barcodes at each site you can monitor which poster sites produce more traffic/take up.

In turn that should help communicators to focus their outdoor advertising on those places where it’s most effective.

9 | Adrian Short

November 10th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

Sharon,

The Google Chart API will always return the same barcode for the same URL, but there’s nothing to stop you feeding it bit.ly URLs or anything else you can contrive.

For example, you might want to encode:

http://www.mycouncil.gov.uk/page?id=123&site=central-library

although doing something like that would probably break your general web stats as it would treat each site as a separate page.

I suppose you could create a little forwarding app that took a URL like this (which would be in the barcode):

http://www.mycouncil.gov.uk/poster?url=http://www.mycouncil.gov.uk/page?id=123&site=central-library

that then logged a hit for that page at that site in its own stats database and then redirected to http://www.mycouncil.gov.uk/page?id=123

There is definitely potential to key hits from these posters/barcodes either per site or simply to record that the hit came from a barcode/poster.

10 | Pez

November 10th, 2009 at 2:50 pm

@Andy I wholeheartedly agree with you, but I do think (as John says) that some education is needed first.

I don’t think space is going to allow us to put an explaination on the Rayemyplace posters, but when we start putting them on things like planning notices (which I’m hoping we will), we’ll be trying to school people in the joys of QR codes.

11 | Pez

November 10th, 2009 at 2:55 pm

@Sharon/Adrian Wouldn’t generating separate bit.ly URLs and using the stats reporting there be a quick win?

Obviously you’d have to match URLs with sites, but it would mean no server-side fiddling if you’ve got no internal technical resource?