QR coded blog entries

Innovations is – if it works, but you do not have the technology to prove it. The blogpost title, the blogpost date, the URI to each blogpost and some copyright (\”CC\”) information of this weblog are QR coded. Actually the images have not been decoded yet, since the writer of that code has no QR code scanner nor has he a mobile phone with an appropriate software to decode those codes.

But anyway. QR codes are kind of twodimensional barcodes [1].

While conventional bar codes are capable of storing a maximum of approximately 20 digits, QR Code is capable of handling several dozen to several hundred times more information.

20 digits are not enough to encode a typical blog title, a link, a date string and some copyright information. As an example, the QR coded string for this blog post is: \”QR coded blog entries, 06.10.2005 00:23:26, http://circle.ch/blog/p1773.html, CC-by-sa_2.5\”. The QR code library behind my implementation is written by Y. Swetake [4].

If it makes sense, to link from a QR code to a blog post, is not yet plain clear. But I could imagine a simpler, maybe automated navigation for mobile phones:

  • Reading a blog feed (e.g. qr.xml or qr img link in the RSS feed) with QR codes
  • The phone decodes the images and displays the title to the blog entries
  • A single click on the auto-linked title is enough to access the full blog post

At least in Japan there are various applications that support QR codes [2]; e-commerce e.g. is a big issue [3]. Is anyone out there with an opensource QR code decoder? 😉

Update: The ETH Zürich has a project running called \”Visual Code Recognition for Camera-Equipped Mobile Phones\” [5]. They also provide so called Recognizer software for Symbian OS based mobile phones.

[1] http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/qrfeature-e.html
[2] http://www.eurotechnology.com/store/qr-code/sample.html
[3] http://www.camreader.jp/eng/service/index.html
[4] http://www.swetake.com/qr/
[5] http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/rohs/visualcodes/

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