Sheep location revealed … sort of
On Thursday I ‘lost’ my Twitter avatar (a sheep); by Saturday afternoon it had been found lurking on someone else’s blog.
I had been playing around with QR codes and wondered if the QuickMark iPhone application would be able to recognise them in a Twitter avatar. So I replaced my long-standing picture of a sheep with a QR code. At first I just encoded the url to my About Me page, but as friends began bemoaning the loss of the sheep I thought it would be fun to play a game.
So I made up a quick graphic and blogged about my lost sheep.
Lost sheep
I didn’t tweet about it at that point because I hadn’t actually found a hiding place for it. However the blog post was picked up pretty quickly and tweeted anyway, so on the train home and with little mobile reception I frantically arranged for two friends to host the image on their blogs. One of them would have the winning image; the other would have an ‘impostor’ which, which clicked, would take the user to an apologetic message telling them they’d found a fraud. The images were in place by Friday morning.
In the meantime though people pretended that they’d found the sheep, tweeting pictures of soft toys or cached images of my avatar. Karen Strunks even went as far as creating her own, claiming she’d caught my sheep out shopping:
My sheep, dressed up
The game didn’t last long though. On Saturday morning I gave a clue – probably giving too much away – and in no time Simon Gray had found it.
What I don’t know, and would be intrigued to find out, is just how many people were looking, how long they spent on it and how much they enjoyed it. I have anecdotal evidence from a couple of people that they found it fun, but that’s all I know. I had more than 300 page requests for the relevant blog posts, but how many of those were returning visitors is a mystery.
So where was it? Well that would be telling 
Suffice to say I am extremely grateful to Laura Whitehead and Daren Forsyth for being so willing and accommodating. You are both stars 
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Glad your sheep turned up safe and sound.
really missed your sheep, but didn’t get chance to look for it for you sorry. good game tho.
I was looking, although I was offline over the weekend so didn’t get the clue.