For the second time this year I got a dollar bill stamped with the “official” Where’s George stamp. The first was at the Portland Zoo back in July, the second yesterday here in town, from the Factory Outlets. For the uninitiated, Where’s George is a bill tracker, where users can enter the serial numbers from various denominations of money and their location, and the system will track those bills, and show you a report of where that bill has previously been (if another user had already entered it).
It’s a neat concept, one of the first of this type I think (along with other sites like BookCrossing), that came out a few years back. All or most of the original stamped bills were released on the East Coast, I believe, so it’s interesting to see them finally circulating out west.
Of course, it’s also easy to overlook the fact that this is a massive database tracking the existence and whereabouts of hundreds of millions of dollars across the country, which I’m sure gives paranoid conspiracy theorists nightmares… Myself, on the other hand, I’m a data junkie, and I would just love to get a peek at that database…