Tag: link

This is cool. Slash get off my lawn.

Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me.

(…)

6. I need to go home and write my essay slash take a nap.

(…)

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you

via BoingBoing

QR Codes: great, but then what?

I keep a long and ever-growing outline of blog topics I may someday write about. Most aren’t fully formed, but each at least once struck me as interesting at some point or another, so I figured they’re worth keeping around.1 (See one real example to right.)

  • <3 qr-codes
    • bridges the physical and the cyber
    • low-tech, lowest-common denominator
    • cam­er­a­phones in every pocket
    • makes a lot more sense than com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies, like that microsoft one with the dif­fer­ent col­ors that requires color print­ing, etc. this one I could, if so inclined, draw with a pencil
    • sadly, most of what I use this tech­nol­ogy for is curiously decod­ing barcodes I come across on the web

I add topics to my list pretty regularly, but what doesn’t happen very regularly is someone reading my mind and writing my post for me. Okay, it’s only happened once: about a week ago, and it was geeking out on QR Codes.

I’m a bit behind on my RSS reading, but when I just came across this boingboing post, I was quite pleased. In it, guest blogger Glenn Fleishman pretty much lays out the case for 2D barcodes — QR being the most popular, good/open-enough format — as a useful sort of link between the physical world and the digital one. It’s an idea I happen to have loved for a few years now, and with Internet-enabled cameraphones all over the place, one that has the potential2 to create some benefit to society on a large scale.

It should come as little surprise, then, that for as long as I’ve been aware of these codes, I’ve longed to find a use for the technology aside from the mundane let people scan your ad to go to your website, or send a URL from your computer to your phone. A handful of boingboing commenters pointed out a few real-world examples of ways they have used QR codes: labeling shared lab equipment or getting on the VIP list at Tokyo clubs. Interesting they are; world-changing they’re not.

Of course, there’s also the idea of providing richer information about wine than a simple bottle label could display, which I find a step above the others, and giving extra context to museum art, which I think gets us even closer.

Yet I still think QR Codes have even greater potential… but potential isn’t even half the battle.

  1. Yes, they’re basically brain crack.[↩]
  2. Naturally, the barrier to adoption is convincing the average person to bother solving for themselves a problem — easy URL/text/contact entry on their phone — they didn’t realize they had.[↩]

It’s fear, mostly.

Inc. Magazine: Why Is Business Writing So Awful?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying, “Our products are like everyone else’s, too.” Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet — the marketplace?

Fear, mostly.

(via Ryan)