In the paper, People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, researchers at HP described in 2008 how to support "web presence" for people, place and things. It actually refers to the Cooltown project, which has been conducted 5-6 years ago. Some elements from the paper:

"We put web servers into things like printers and put information into web servers about things like artwork; we group physically related things into places embodied in web servers. Using URLs for addressing, physical URL beaconing and sensing of URLs for discovery, and localized web servers for directories, we can create a location-aware but ubiquitous system to support nomadic users. On top of this infrastructure we can leverage Internet connectivity to support communications services."

Why do I blog this? Although the project was more about supporting communication services and providing nomadic users with an access to object/information without a central control point, I was interested in that from another perspective: the agency of artifacts. Beyond their potential accessibility through the Internet, what does that mean when my watch, my lamp or even toilets have a web presence? This aspect is not that addressed in the paper and more obviously connects with the near future laboratory interest in blogjects.

Reference: Kindberg, T., Barton, J., Morgan, J., Becker, G., Caswell, D., Debaty, P., Gopal, G., Frid, M., Krishnan, V. Morris, H., Schettino, J., Serra, B. & Spasojevic, M. (2002). People, Places, Things: Web Presence for the Real World, Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2000 Third IEEE Workshop on, pp. 19-28.