Business card,
originally uploaded by eszter.

I’m always on the lookout for ways to organize physical objects digitally. Back when I was guest-blogging at Lifehacker I posted an entry about using Flickr to help keep track of wines by taking pictures of their labels and uploading them to Flickr. While a handy tool, I’m not much of a wine fan so it’s not something I’ve been able to use myself.

But now I have thought of a way to apply this method to something that is quite present in my everydays: business cards.

Despite lots of material available about people on the Web, exchanging hard-copy business cards is still something people seem to do quite a bit. There is some value to it. If you add a few notes to the card then the card can help you remember the person. That is, the person may have a Web site with all the relevant contact info, but if you cannot recall their name then that won’t be of too much help. Business cards can help in remembering people’s names and recalling the context in which you met them.

So I started taking snapshots of business cards I have collected recently. I upload these pictures to my account on Flickr. Since people don’t necessarily want their contact info floating around publicly, I have specified these pictures as completely private.

I then add information about the context of the meeting in the notes field and info about people’s affiliation and fields in the tags.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 15th, 2005 at 10:18 am and is filed under IT/Comm, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.