QR tags edging towards mainstream?

A London-based ‘tech PR’ blog post said this week:

When Kelly Brooks starts appearing in ads featuring QR codes you know that the 2D dot matrix bar code technology is close to a tipping point. Brooks features in a Pepsi campaign that has gone live this week and images of her clutching a QR code have featured in most of the tabloids.

Source: QR codes and the Kelly Brooks Pepsi campaign, hat tip for link: Heleana Quartey.

See also p8tch.com who says ‘think of it as a TinyURL you can wear’ and emmacott.com who say ‘wear your profile’. There’s even a Facebook ‘add to friends’ QR app and a Google Charts QR Code API.

It’s interesting timing, as QR codes were discussed in a MCG thread on ‘Putting web addresses on interpretation‘ that was in essence about linking from the offline physical world and online content.

While they’re not mainstream enough to be a viable solution yet, we could be getting close to the tipping point where QR tags might become a viable way of bookmarking real world objects and locations. QR tags also provide a way of linking locations to online content without the requirements for a location-aware device.

Are blog awards missing the point?

And not only that, but why did I feel disconcerted when this blog was nominated for an award back in April? (I didn’t win, but that wasn’t surprising.) I kept meaning to post back with the results, but I hadn’t yet managed to articulate how I felt about it.

Today Paul Walk blogged ‘I think I might be allergic to lists and awards‘, which sums up a lot of my inchoate thoughts. In posting a comment I realised that I found being reminded that I have an audience a bit disconcerting. I also realised that the value of this blog for me is the chance to learn more, not only during the process of writing a post but also during the online and offline discussions that follow.

Anyway, go read Paul’s post. Tony Hirst also makes an interesting point in his comment – awards may act as ‘crossover’ that introduces non-blog-readers to the value of blogs.