Resonance Design

everything and nothing that involves notions of a design and thinking pattern that Rob van Kranenburg and me called "Resonance Design" (or Extelligence Design, your choice)

Thursday, October 27, 2005

ThingLink is really a convention for marking things.

Free Product Code, by Ulla-Maaria:

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What would be a Last.fm for the products in the invisible tail? I started to think about this after meeting Jimbo Wales at Reboot 7 in Copenhagen. With my friends Adam Wern, Jyri Engeström, and Eric Wahlforss, we came up with a definition for a free product code called ThingLink (thinglink.org/thinglinks.com). ThingLink is an open project aiming to enable anybody to create unique product codes for free. Literally, ThingLinks are meant to work as links to things that exist offline.

You can ThingLink the objects you show on your weblog or on Flickr for instance, and ask other people to use the same code when they refer to that object. This enables the tracking of the object in search engines like Technorati. We also created an open encyclopedia for products called WikiProducts. I started tagging some of my objects with ThingLinks, for example a bag, a dress, my laptop cover, and so on. And in this form it already works. Try Googling the ThingLink Thing: 618736AB, and you’ll end up on the WikiProducts page about my laptop cover.

Free product codes can revolutionize the existing markets. To break out from the domination of global brands, a topic that Naomi Klein talks about in No Logo, it may make sense to march in the streets, but it can also be effective to encourage people to tag their products with unique codes and put them online so that we can refer to them and recommend them to our friends.