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Extensions to Known Formats

This poster from outside a Taipei design department store includes links to photographer's galleries on Flickr.

Why is it interesting? It's not simply the use of web addresses (rather than QR bar codes, physical addresses, or phone numbers) but the assumptions about what you will or will not find when you link to a Flickr address. The poster may have SEX writ large, but do you expect to find this kind of content on a corporate sub-site to hosting material by howhao, chenyian, myberyl or wangshuwe?

Exactly.

And at what point in the race for media-consumer mindshare it is possible to reduce a web site address from http://www.flickr.com/photos/chenyian down to flickr/chenyian, and still be understood by the mainstream? Why not just chenyian?

Which is of course not a million miles away from keywords. Which is why anything that can shorten the path - taking information from the world around us and making it easier to apply to tasks that we want to complete, has significant potential. PC and mobile search tools are evolving and indeed make search engines/ad agencies a fair income. But it is frankly limited compared to search where if you can see it or think it you can search for it.

Writing from Taipei | May 14, 2007 | Permalink