An intriguing post by Ulla Maaria-Mutanen about thinglink, a concept I was not aware of:

A thinglink is a free unique identifier that anybody can use for making the finding and recommendation of particular things easier in the Internet.

A thinglink identifier is based on the idea that many of the things we use in our daily life are quite particular. Perhaps we know their origin (who has made them, when and how) and something about their history or previous use (like with furniture and cars). Some things have more meaning to us than others. (...) Thinglinks are unique, 8-digit identifiers that anybody can use for connecting physical or virtual objects to any online information about them. A thinglink on an object is an indication that there is some information about the object online—perhaps a blog post, some flickr photos, a manufacturer’s website, a wikipedia article, or just some quick comments on a discussion site.

The purpose of the thinglink.org is to offer an easy way to learn about products and artifacts in their various contexts of production and use. Small-scale producers such as artists, designers, and crafters can use thinglinks to bring their products to the emerging recommendation-based market in the Internet

Why do I blog this? well this is very close to ID specifications of Bruce Sterling's concept of spimes! There is a website coming out about this: Thinglink Besides, it's closely related to our discussion about blogjects with Julian. This 'thinglink' idea could be seen a way of implementing the blogject concept since it's able to connect information (on the web) and artifacts. So Julian what do you think? Let's all meet and talk about it. Isn't there a workshop scheduled about this in 2006 conference? Well, let's have a workshop about blogject at LIFT then! (something like the day before).