Bringing Wikipedia to the real world

Posted by The Technocrat | Filed under Geeky, Hardware, Web

SemapediaIf you’re a geek, you know about Wikipedia. If you’re a real geek, you’ve found yourself wanting access to wikipedia when you, ahem, go outside. It’s true tat you can fire up your web-enabled phone, surf to wikipedia, search for what you want, and finally get the information on what you’re looking at. Chances are, you might learn more about wherever you are, and maybe even learn some things they would never tell you on the tour.

If you’ve found yourself in this situation, the wait is over. Semapedia has developed a 2D bar code that maps to a specific wikipedia article. A small application on your phone analyzes a 2D barcode affixed to an object or location via the phone’s camera, and pulls up the corresponding wikipedia article. Cool!

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks. Whoever owns the object might not like to have barcodes stuck to it. Imagine the problems with marking a national monument… But it wouldn’t be hard to have it affixed to a plaque or something, right next to the text and braille descriptions. Besides the sticker ugliness, there may be those who don’t have a favorable wikipedia entry that they want advertised. But for those who do, there may be an opportunity to put a 2D bar code on the back of a business card.

To me, this is what Web 2.0 is all about. The name has been tossed around so much that it’s pretty much a joke now, and has come to describe rounded corners and AJAX-y effects. But Semapedia is on the right course here as to the true meaning of Web 2.0; to add more functionality to the web to the same degree that web 1.0 added more functionality to everything.

One thing I noticed is that you can make a semapedia-based hyperlink tag (physilink?) of any URL. Check this out:

Semapedia

In the true spirit of Web 2.0, I hope this means that the mobile application by Semapedia is set up to access the web directly, which would be ideal. This system could easily be overwhelmed if it depended on a single point of failure, i.e. a table at the Semapedia site that is doing the “tag #100237563 = http://www.geeklimit.com” translation.

I don’t think this is the case, but I can’t confim, since I’m not fluent in 2D bar code… If anyone can confirm the mechanism, please do so.

Comments (4) | May 23rd, 2006

4 Responses to “Bringing Wikipedia to the real world”

  1. RyanC Says:
    May 24, 2006 at 6:53 pm

    Sounds like quite a neat idea, so long as it was made to work with any sort of camera/reader device. It would be idea for people to stick on a plaque or so on, for tourists to check out further information.

  2. E@zyVG Says:
    May 25, 2006 at 1:24 am

    I am already thinking of using such info tags on ladies … now that would be cool.

    I am a geek who can’t live w/o ladies … lol

  3. CrazyBarbour Says:
    May 25, 2006 at 7:52 am

    Semapedia is a lot like QR code…. and I can read the above picture with QuickMark on my PDA.

  4. Zooey Deschanel Katy Perry Says:
    November 15, 2010 at 9:14 pm

    Thanks, I have recently been seeking for facts about this subject for ages and yours is the best I’ve found so far.

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