Some of you have allready noticed two distinct barcodes on my weblog. One conventional barcode and a strange looking 2d barcode (picture on the left!). What’s that all about? Let me tell you a little more.

Barcodes are ways to create computer-readable information. The well known barcodes you find on your products in the supermarket and on books simply represent a series of numbers. In the supermarket product you can tell the country of origin and the manufacturer and product code from the barcodes. This is all governed by international standards. This means that (in theory at least) all different products have different barcodes and are therefor identifiable.

In books barcodes are used to create a computer-readable version of the ISBN or International Standardized Book Number. Every title has it’s own barcode and therefor is identifiable. This is practical for libraries, but also for you. If you are a member of librarything.com for instance, you could simply use a cheap barcode-scanner to enter the ISBN-codes of your books and thereby add your books to your collection-records in this social network. It’s practical for those with limited numerical data-entry skills and tech geeks alike. (and just plain fun).

A weblog could be considered a magazine or a book. However the standardization committees behind the ISBN numbering did not think it was a good idea to give out ISBN’s to blogs. That’s why ibsn.org/ started their own version of a ISBN-like numbering scheme for blogs, IBSN, the Internet Blog Serial Number. Naturally we need a computer-readable form for such a number, hence the IBSN barcodes. Mine can be found in the sidebar over there: –>

Barcodes are a bit limited. Limited to numerical information, and limited in size. If you want more information or alphanumeric information, you need something else. Enter the 2d barcode. With 2d barcodes you can create a computer-readable code that contains for instance an URL or an actual address. You could create codes containing all contact-information or any text of choice.

One interesting part of this concept is that you could actually attach a 2d barcode to a real-life object and therefor create a link to a website about the object in the real world. There are many applications allready in existance that you can use on your mobile phone to photograph a 2d barcode and than visit the URL it contains. This type of 2d barcode is called a QR-code and actually connects the real life to the virtual one.

Another use could be to put your 2d barcode pointing to your website or weblog on your business cards or to put your 2d barcode pointing to a special sale website on the label of products. These are very attractive uses for such codes.

The use of these barcodes is still limited but it could be the next big thing in advertising and the way to connect the outside world with the online one we spend lots of time in these days.

I hope you like that post, feel free to comment