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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I’m not going to reveal the location just yet: I need to sit down and blog it properly, so in the meantime people may as well have the chance to continue looking.

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Apparently the location of this sighting has nothing to do with the British Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve also heard a rumour that it may be south of Bristol. Both reports are unconfirmed though.

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Somewhere there is a lost sheep. I belive it’s trapped in yellow box, like this:

If you can find where it is on the web and post the url in a comment on this post, you will restore the sheep to its rightful place on Twitter. And win yourself a Mars Bar.

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