How to make Quick Response codes work for your publication

Starting Tuesday and through November, you'll see this at the bottom of the front page in the print edition of the Daily Freeman:

It's a QR (Quick Response) code. It will run with the following explanation.

"Scan this QR (Quick Response) code to 'Like' the Freeman on Facebook. You will need special software on your camera-equipped smartphone to decode the image. Search for ‘QR code’ in your phone’s app store"

You'll need a smartphone, and it could be any of these:

This is part of the Journal Register Company's Idealab, something that I'm not explaining again.

Anyway, if you are too lazy to search for 'QR code' in your phone's app store, here are some, based on a quick search and categorized by device. I'm only listing free apps:


iPhone:

* QR app;

* Neoreader;

* QRCode.

Blackberry: 

* QR Code Scanner Pro;

* BeeTagg;

* ATT Code Scanner.

 Android:

Barcode Scanner;

Goggles.

And here's an awful person doing a live video pretending to explain QR codes.

Watch live streaming video from dailyfreeman at livestream.com


 

I know. Awful.

Note that this video, via the Freeman's new Livestream channel, was broadcast, well, live, through the site's channel and on Facebook, which would have added amazing user interaction if I had actually bothered to tell anyone that I was broadcasting.

Oh, well. Next time.

P.S. If you are keeping tabs, my challenge was to double our Facebook fans and triple our Twitter followers. I've been off since Oct. 30, so I'm technically just starting today. Since then, we've gone from 1,200 Facebook 'Likes' to 1,424; and from 600 followers to 651. Some of that growth is natural, and some is due to ease of access (you might have noticed the widgets on our stories and the main site). The big push starts now.