The Carrot Project

This project was born in Beijing.* Apparently it’s still there.

Whenever a name I don’t recognize requests an invitation to come play on the site, I send a little note, say hi, and ask how that person knows us or found out about us.

This is from the latest reply to one of those emails:

I’ve been enjoying following TCP over the last few months. To be honest, I’m not really sure how we know each other. I sat down at a computer in an internet cafe near Tsinghua University early this spring, and the carrot project website was up from the previous user. I thought it looked interesting so asked to join up.

Someday, I hope, this won’t strike me as a blogworthy event. Someday, lots of people in lots of gigantic Eastern Hemisphere cities will be leaving browsers running and planting carrots every day. Today, I’m a little stunned.

Stunned, smiling, and wondering if there exist enterprising internet cafe proprietors that make deals with online businesses and strategically manipulate the home page settings on all the browsers in their cafes.

Not because I want to make one of those deals or become one of those proprietors or anything. Just curious…

*Note: Either that or born on a boat. Depends on your definition of birth. Mine changes sometimes.