This article in the NYT made me think that there seems to be a new bubble in platforms that allows attaching stories to physical objects. The article mentions Tales of things (" Slap on a sticker with a newfangled bar code, and anybody with a properly equipped smartphone can scan the object and learn..."), Itizen ("a tell-and-tag approach") and Sticky Bits (" can also be used to link content to an existing bar code").

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Goldstein theorizes that the motive was the same “microboredom” that inclines users of mobile check-in apps to announce that they’ve arrived at Chili’s — except that users could broadcast not just where they were but also what objects were around them. Some do use StickyBits to communicate something specific to people they know, but many essentially use it as a media platform. (...) Under that scenario, things are being linked to a story not so much in the form of narrative as of cumulative data. The continuum moves even further in the direction of raw information when you consider what tech experts call the “Internet of things” — more and more stuff produced with sensors and tags and emitting readable data (...) As more objects have more to say, the question becomes what we want to hear, and from what."

Curiously, I haven't seen any mention of Thinglink, which was one of the first platform to propose a globally unique object identifier. Developed by Social Objects Oy, a company founded by Ulla-Maaria Mutanen and Jyri Engeström, it's now a platform where the thinglink object code is linked to further references, such as photos, descriptive text, tags, maker(s), owner(s), and web links.

Why do I blog this? It's been a while that I follow this trend and it's funny so much activity along these lines. Possibly some interesting things to be discussed at Lift11. What I am curious about is how this is connected to blogjects and how things have changed in the last few years.