Track your dollar bills, literally

Where's George? is a nifty (and kind of geeky) little site that has been around for awhile. It was created by a Bostonian database programmer who was curious about where the bills in his pockets had been before they reached him. The site allows you to enter the serial number of your bills, and, if other people have already entered the same bill into the system, to view the bill's voyage, at least the part of its voyage that was entered by other Where's George users.

The site has a decent following with tens of thousands of regular users, but they still only manage to account for less than a thousandth of one percent of all bills in circulation. The top users engage in a sort of competition to see who can get the most "hits", or have a "hit" in every state. They do this by stamping their bills with a URL to Where's George, and still the all-time most entered bill has a grand total of ... wait for it ... 15 entries.

I have been a member of the site since April '07 (link to my user profile), and I just logged back in again the other day to see if any of the 13 bills I entered had any hits. They don't.

I like the idea of the site and I think it would be especially interesting if more people used it, but since they don't, that got me wondering about more effective ways to get the same sort of information: It would be really interesting (in a geeky and useless sort of way) to put a GPS enabled chip in a small sample of bills hot off the printing presses so that we could follow their entire journey from birth to death. But you would still probably have the same problem that only a small group of nerds would care.