Last year, after 15 years in the shadows, QR codes had their fifteen minutes of fame. I didn’t blog or even talk about them much; the idea seemed too remote to chase.
In that spirit, I started out as less than enthusiastic about an announcement by Entertainment Weekly (where, long ago, I once worked) that the magazine was embedding Microsoft Tag elements to let readers migrate from print to online in a seamless fashion.
The first time EW tried this (using a different vendor), something like 5,000 readers clicked through. That’s not a lot.
But this is also a magazine dedicated to informing its readers about a wide range of media: television, movies, music, books, videos and games. For the same reasons that print alone no longer makes sense, a commitment by EW to help readers migrate away from the printed page also may make sense.
Ultimately, readers decide, and so we can await the results of this test. But I’m not as skeptical this time around. Maybe all those URLs I lose every time I accidentally close Firefox finally won me over.
