Semapedia.org - Wiki Meets the Real World

Tagging in the real, meatspace world is an urban, semi-artistic endeavor which entails scrawling your handle all over public surfaces. Tagging in the wired universe is, of course, a folksonomy, a means of categorizing and organizing ideas, terms, things and themes. Semapedia brings the two together again, so to speak. Here’s how it works: you choose a wiki article with a real world connection. Copy the article’s URL and paste it into the Semapedia form (on the site’s homepage). Semapedia will churn out custom made tags available as a printable PDF. Print out the tags and attach them according to the content they link to (in some cases, it’d be wise to ask for permission, or simply do your deed at under the cover of nightfall). Cell phone users will be able access the wiki info by simply pointing their screens at the tag (provided they first download a 2D Barcode Reader for their phone). It’s tagging 2.0 style.

“Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space. To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks.”

The idea of inverting tagging, i.e. graffiti, and turning into something truly useful again (rather than the simplified expressions that current day tags have become) is ingenious. It spreads knowledge in a very modern way. Everyone has a phone, after all; the same type of hyperlinking is used in advertising—with Semapedia it serves a better purpose.

Is Semapedia too geeky? Does anyone foresee armies of wikinerds tagging city walls and public buildings with PDF printouts? I doubt permission would be granted for such tags, as such they’d have the same value as graffiti tags.