Internet as virtual lost and found for the world
By Leslie Poston
The internet has became all things to all people. That includes a kind of ethereal Lost and Found department for actual off line, real world items. If you know where and how to look, you can find what you’ve lost, even if you lost it decades before.
People blog about items they’ve found on web sites dedicated to objects like cameras and photos or other personal items. People post items they have found on Craig’s List and other classified sites. They put them up on MySpace and FaceBook. They toss photos found up on sites like Flickr with contact information attached.
All you need to find your lost item, most of the time, is a good search engine, some time a bit of luck – the world is still a vast ocean of information even though the internet makes it smaller every day. In some cases, it’s all luck – in one recently popular example a couple were alerted to their wedding photos being online through a friend who randomly saw them on the internet at a site dedicated to lost cameras and photos.
This desire to be reunited with lost items and people has spawned dual on and offline businesses like FOUNDmagazine with its companion site FOUNDmagazine.com. FOUND uses both online / new media and old school print media to reconnect people, places, and things. FOUND’s founder, Davy Rothbart, said:
We all have a curiosity about the people we share the world with,” Rothbart said. “The fact is, when you find a note blowing down the street, it’s a fragment of a story. It’s up to you to fill in the blanks. There’s something exciting about that.
Photos and cameras are not the only items you can reconnect with online. There are companies offering to help you find everything from your shoes, to cars, to recipes on up to people. The idea of finding lost things online has become so mainstream that CNN did a piece on it, with a nice complete list of online lost and found resources. So what are you waiting for? Go see if someone, somewhere is holding your favorite cake recipe from your Grandma hostage, or maybe found that awesome pair of Manolo Blahniks you left behind at the hotel when you went on your walk of shame home.
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on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
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