“My contention is that the first (subcultural) story about warchalking above is entirely a media phenomenon — it is a beautiful idea, but it doesn’t make any sense as a directory service to find Wi-Fi. It is too easy to miss a warchalk mark, and the chalk wears away (or washes away in the rain) too quickly.
Warchalking symbols were heavily promoted in the New York Times just *48 hours* after they were first made public on the Web. There was a subsequent wave of media stories about warchalking, giving everyone ideas. Every single occurrence of chalk I’ve found can be attributed to chalkers who want to self-promote their own mark. So I believe that people *do* rarely make warchalking marks for various reasons (to be cool, to advertise for their own network) but I *don’t* believe that people use warchalking marks in a meaningful way to find Wi-Fi.
(In December) I posted a call to many colleagues around the world asking for verifiable instances of warchalking that work the way that warchalking describes itself. Reports to date: zero. If warchalking worked as a directory location service, shouldn’t I be able to find it?”
Even though I have never myself noticed a warchalking symbol anywhere around town, my guess is that this is a bad bet. Even if the initial story was apocryphal, it was seen as such a good idea by a number of people that a number of them must have begun doing it. It seems to me that in the initial flood of enthusiasm about the phenomenon, I saw photographs on the web of instances of warchalking graffitti people had encountered. I may not be understanding his point, since I’m not sure exactly what he means by “want(ing) to promote their own mark”, but it beats me how that would be distinguished from a “meaningful” way of finding a Wi-Fi node.
