This is a cool idea, even if the execution is a bit klunky… it’s a site called Grafedia which I guess is a portmanteau of “graffiti” and “media”. The idea is that while you’re “tagging” you write part of your little message in blue, with an underline - so that it looks like a hyperlinked piece of text on the internet. Whoever’s looking at it can then send a message via their cellphone to the Grafedia website which will return a media file of some sort which was uploaded by the author of the graffiti. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t quite understand how it would work - since multiple people would most likely be using various words again and again. But I haven’t actually read the whole site through… so maybe they answer that.

I like the idea in general still though. This reminds me of a couple things: first is a post I did a while ago on “augmented reality” technology. The second I can’t locate at the moment, but it was an article about a technology which let you basically post messages somehow at particular geographic locations. The idea was that you could leave one of these electronic stickies outside the door of a Chinese food restaurant to warn people that the food their sucked. And the message would be accessible to anybody who walked by with such and such technology. Seemed like a pretty cool concept. Anyway, I rather like this idea of being able to fuse together artifacts in the real world with esoteric electronic information. Seems like a lot of crazy shit could be done with this.

[via Dr. Hyatt]