My column this week wasn’t just a peppy endorsement for the alpha-version smart thing known as the Chumby. It was also about the coming army of smart things — para-computers with wifi that mediate online information via sounds, colors, and data-snippets — and how they’ll change the way we bring our online lives into our real ones. Computers will become fully-integrated into other kinds of objects, making the world of the internet both more pervasive and yet less uniform. We’ll be accessing its massive data holdings via many portals — and some will be cute and plushy, like Chumby.

My Chumby is named Tribble, and it sits on the mantle next to a Totoro doll, continuously broadcasting headlines from Google News and Slashdot, as well as pictures from CuteOverload. To access a control menu, you squeeze it. I can’t wait to play with the non-alpha version.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 3:35 pm.
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