In celebration of my brother’s engagement, he and his fiancé hosted a dinner party Saturday night. As with most parties I’ve attended recently, I knew only a couple people. I was forced to mingle with lots of people I didn’t know.
At one point I was introduced to the fiancé’s uncle, a laid back type of guy who showed me a handful of charms attached to a chain. He explained the charms had made a journey around the world and were going to be placed at the family’s next stop. He and his daughter tracked the charms using a social networking sensation called geocaching.
Saturday night was the first I had heard of geocaching and immediately became engrossed. Geocaching is kind of a contemporary treasure hunt using the internet as a guide. Items are placed in specific locations for the purposes of modern day treasure hunters to find and trade the item with other strangers. Items are tracked using the website geocaching.com.
In the old days treasure hunts meant participants had to collect items from a list. Points were awarded based on the rarity of the object or how difficult it was to procure. Geocaching seems to have just the opposite purpose, items are discovered and exchanged.
A similar type of tracking has been done with dollar bills for years. The website wheresgeorge.com tracks US dollar bills throughout the world based on serial numbers. Dollar bills are stamped with the wheresgeorge.com website and logo and then logged into the website’s database.
Users of wheresgeorge.com can look up where the currency has been and how it was used. If there’s a story behind how the bill was acquired or spent, then that story can be logged. Participants of this website are encouraged to mark new bills, which according to the website, is perfectly legal.
Geocaching and tracking dollar bills is a new form of social media that brings complete strangers together for a common mission. Prior to the internet this type of networking wouldn’t have been possible. It takes a network of many to make these types of activities possible.
The founder of the wheresgeorge.com website is a database designer by trade and started the website in his spare time. It was a way for him and his children to track the whereabouts of bills as they traveled the world. As more people saw the stamped logos the website grew and his database drastically increased in size.
Over the years the founder of wheresgeorge.com has monetized the collected data by compiling and selling it to researchers. One example used the tracking data of currency and correlated it against a flu outbreak in 2009. Another example I read about years ago used the information to corroborate a theory of how people migrated.
Geocaching doesn’t seem to have any way to monetize itself based on data. Geocaching.com offers mementos and other swag branded with the site name and logo. Based on the site’s popularity, I postulate they sell a significant amount of merchandise to its user base.
Though geocaching and tracking dollar bills is fairly new, I believe these activities will lead the way for other similar activities. These two websites are merely the pioneers of this new social media outlet which brings people together for a common good. Whether these types of sites will be able to generate revenue has yet to prove itself. I’m pushing for the next phase which will lead me to more parties where I don’t know anyone.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can call him at (978) 919-8059 or visit www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)