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Similar in concept is the Grafedia project (www.grafedia.net). Unlike Yellow Arrow, it doesn't cost you a penny to tag a place, but there's a downside from an environmental viewpoint. To put a location online you have to write an email address, such as myfavouriteplace@grafedia.net, on a nearby object. This address also has to be in blue and underlined so that it looks like a hyperlink. Judging from the photographs on the Grafedia website, most people do this using blue spray paint, a marker pen or chalk.

Where Yellow Arrow is mainly for sharing text, with photographs as a secondary consideration, Grafedia is first and foremost about images. To tag a place, you send a photograph from your mobile phone to the Grafedia email address you've chosen. Others will retrieve your image by sending a blank email to that same address. Grafedia is not a commercial website, so whether or not it works depends on whether or not the people running it are keeping up to date with site maintenance. It looks as if the site hasn't been active this year, which could indicate that this is a bit of a dead end in the evolution of the Internet of Things.

Yellow Arrow claims that arrows are posted in 395 cities in 37 countries and that 1,581 people have registered. But this is just a drop in the ocean compared to the number of potential users with internet access. The project has a cult following, mainly in the USA and Scandinavia, and has been particularly successful in connection with certain events. At an arts festival in New York, for example, 10 Yellow Arrows posted by festival organisers attracted thousands of hits in a single week.

If these sorts of markers were a truly

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useful or interesting way of linking the internet to the outside world, the web would be awash with imitators. But it isn't. Neither Yellow Arrow nor Grafedia have enjoyed mass-market appeal. That isn't really surprising given that accessing either requires a considerable amount of user input. Both show the potential for the Internet of Things, but they're not the way this new internet will work in the future.

RFID tags

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags have received a good deal of media coverage recently, thanks to their use in everything from ID cards to getting your rubbish bins to spy on you. RFID tags, which are starting to appear on the goods we buy, can be read from a distance of a few metres and the reader doesn't have to be in the line of sight of the tag.

This could mean shorter queues at supermarket checkouts, as instead of each object having to be scanned individually, a whole trolley full of groceries could be scanned almost instantaneously. But there's another major difference between RFID tags and the barcodes they are replacing. Whereas a barcode represents a number just a few digits long - enough to identify that the object is, for example, a 250g jar of Marmite - RFID tags have a number long enough to represent every single item ever manufactured.

Since RFID tags are sometimes fixed to the item itself, not just its packaging, it is understandable that privacy campaigners are concerned about this use of the technology. For example, say you present a loyalty card when paying for RFID-tagged clothing. The store would be able to identify you the next time you returned wearing the item, should it have the inclination and technology installed to do so.

To date, RFID tags have been mostly of benefit only to manufacturers and retailers, with few apparent advantages to consumers. However, this is a technology that experts believe may soon fuel the Internet of Things, and it isn't hard to see why. Concepts such as Yellow Arrow and Grafedia are likely to be nothing more than stepping stones on the way to the Internet of Things because of the user action required to access them. But accessing information associated with an RFID tag would be no more complicated than pressing a button.