An Australian company called DataDot offers sticky solutions for keeping track of real world objects with identifying markings:

DataDots are a state of the art identification and anti-theft security system applicable to most assets. The product consists of polyester substrate micro-dots, each the size of a grain of sand, onto which unique information is laser etched. These unique dots come pre-mixed in a UV based adhesive for ready application onto assets such as cars, motorcycles, snowmobiles, laptops and other electrical equipment, business assets, cell phones, tools, Powersports equipment, and other high value items.

It’s an interesting concept which, I think, is being applied too narrowly. Preventing theft, or else enabling the return of stolen objects seems like an incredibly small-scale way of looking at something which could potentially be enormous. Imagine you had a system which was parallel to the DataDot concept, but maybe worked through RFID or similar technology. What it would ultimately allow you to do is to assign a fixed URL to real world objects.

I wrote about this concept more obliquely back during my “spambot period”… SecondLife has something similar called “slurl” which stands for SecondLife URL. It’s a way of directly connecting locations within the virtual world of SecondLife to web addresses. Really though, there’s no reason this can’t be applied in the real world, if you had the right technological application of it.

You could theoretically tag objects with individual or multiple DataDots and then be able to “visit” the actual object online and find out information about it. Imagine every data-dotted object in the world had its own blog, which was a technical list of interactions it had with other data-enabled objects. You might even eventually be able to apply some kind of remote sensor or video camera located physically near the data-embedded object to pull down visual feeds of it. I’m notoriously bad at making realistic guesses as to when technology advancements will occur, but I see this one as an almost sure thing not too many years down the road.