George gets around.
In the past ten days, I’ve seen reports placing George
in Michigan, as well as Illinois, Connecticut, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania,
New Hampshire, New Jersey, Texas, California and Indiana.
Over the past three years, my Georges logged nearly
750,000 travel miles and visited nearly every state in the Union—although
George is still trying to make it to Alaska last I heard. During the same three
years, George visited Canada, Honduras, Mexico, Bahamas, the Virgin Islands and
Puerto Rico. George also reported back from Germany and the United Kingdom.
I can only wish that I traveled as much as George!
How do I know what George is up to these days? I vicariously
enjoy George’s travels and track them via the Where’s George Web site.
I suppose it may sound geeky to some folks, but I
enjoy seeing where my bills go, tracking their progress with a series of maps
and reading some of the funky user notes people leave for me as they report on
George’s travels.
Where’s George, a currency tracking system devised and
developed by a Massachusetts man, Hank Eskin, tracks user-entered bills by
serial numbers and year issued. Eskin became intrigued with the natural and
geographic way currency circulated and developed a sophisticated database and
site to track the currency he had in his pockets. He launched Where’s George in
late 1998.
Celebrating a decade in existence this month, the
site allows people curious about where their money actually goes when it leaves
their pocket, wallet or purse to track its travels. Users have entered more
than 140,000,000 bills totaling more than $750,000,000 into the site in hopes
of hearing from their George (Tom, Abe, Alex, Andy, Uly or Ben) as it travels.
I love traveling. But if I can’t be on the road, I always
enjoy seeing where George turns up next!
It usually takes at least a few months and a
thousand or so bills to start seeing your Georges travel a little distance, but
it quickly becomes an absorbing hobby for many people.
Most Georgers seem to enter bills for the fun of a
hobby. Others have more serious purposes in mind, like homeschooling parents who
use the site to develop their own lesson plans involving subjects like
geography or math.
Most notably on the serious side, the site attracted
attention of researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and
the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization. Those researchers saw
the currency circulation tracking system as a possible means to help predict
how a virus spreads from human to human.
Reasoning that people take money from place to place, and that viruses
travel in much the same way, researchers monitored the movement of bills and published
their conclusions in the Nature journal.
The site has an extensive network of discussion
forums that range from topics strictly related to currency tracking to a wide
range of social networking, games and threads covering a host of non-Georging subjects.
Because the site draws a wide range of folks of all
ages and from all over the U.S., Canada and even from outside of North America,
it’s possible to find others interested almost any topic imaginable. I’ve found
advice about geocaching, chat with other hockey fans, a few fellow bloggers and
support dealing with difficult situations. When one Georger died suddenly in a
job-related accident earlier this year, his fellow Georgers from around the
country quickly raised money to seed an account to send his youngest child to
college after the kid finishes high school.
Georgers also use the forums to organize local
gatherings like one I attended this week with about a dozen other Georgers from
Michigan and Ohio.
Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to hearing where
George turns up next. Will one of my bills turn up in a vending machine in
Wisconsin? Will one of my bills attend a big hockey tournament or football
contest? Will one of my bills reportedly turn up in a strip bar? Will someone report
back that George is sunning himself on a sunny beach in the tropics? And will
one of my bills finally make it to Alaska?
© Dominique King 2008
Wow. Just wow. That's amazing. I remember hearing about that, years ago, but I had no idea it was still going on. Wow, that's really cool!
Posted by: spyscribbler | December 31, 2008 at 11:22 AM
Spy-
It's a lot of fun once you really get into it--having a good number of bills entered and seeing a few months pass so they have a chance to start traveling.
I got hooked on the site when we found a marked bill in change we got from a local coffee shop. It originally came from New Mexico, with another stop in Michigan before I found it. I was intrigued with seeing where the bills traveled. I've learned a lot about some pretty obscure places by looking up the locations my bills report in from during their travels.
The forums at WG are a lot of fun, and I've met a lot of great folks by going to a few local gets.
Posted by: Dominique King | January 01, 2009 at 08:33 AM