Posts Tagged ‘website’
Money makes it ’round the world, ’round the world, ’round the world …
… with apologies to the creators of Cabaret.
The other night on the way to work I stopped to pick up coffee from the local Tim Horton’s [Wikipedia, Home], as is my usual custom. It wasn’t until later during my lunch break, when I stopped to reorganize my wallet, that I noticed that someone had “tagged” one of the $5 bills in my change. In neat, precise, multicolored handwriting, someone had written:
Track this bill at www.whereswilly.com
Image of the bill with the website’s URL written on it
Curious, I looked up www.whereswilly.com. Willy, as it turns out, is Sir Wilfrid Laurier, first French-Canadian prime minister of Canada, and the person whose portrait is on the Canadian five dollar bill. The website is devoted to tracking the movements of individual Canadian bank notes, based on people visiting the site, and logging when these bills pass into their hands. It works something like this:
- Person A tags a dollar bill (of whatever denomination) with the website’s URL, and registers the bill’s serial number, and the postal code of their location.
- They then spend the bill, passing it into general circulation.
- Person B receives the bill as part of some monetary transaction.
- Person B then goes to the website, logs the bill’s serial number and their location’s postal code.
- The website then updates the record for that bill, and generates a report, which includes how long the bill has been tracked by the site, the locations it has been reported in, how far the bill has traveled, the bill’s average speed (in miles/day), and even — with the aid of Google Maps — a map of the bill’s travels,
- Person B spends the bill, returning it to circulation, which takes us back to step #2, which continues until the bill goes out of circulation.
Users can also register for free with the website. Registration allows them to enter new bills (as in step #1 above), keep lists of “their” bills so they can track where bills they have released have gone, and participate in the discussion forums. It is also — of course — possible to buy “Where’s Willy” merchandise.
The website is a “spin off” of the Where’s George (that would be George Washington, of course) website, which tracks the movement of US paper currency notes. Sadly, for our British brethren, there doesn’t seem to be a Where’s ‘Liz? site for tracking Pound notes — yet.
All in all, I think it is an interesting idea, and a fun toy to play with.
I’ve already spent my marked $5; I’ll be watching to see where it pops up next.
