In A New Kind of Media, Luke Wroblewski writes this:
In a world of social applications, new forms of media are born. An image uploaded to a photo-sharing site can be rated, tagged, linked to, commented on, reviewed, discussed, distributed, and shared. These actions create metadata: number of times viewed, number of times emailed, places linked from, number of ratings, popular tags, and more. This annotation and usage data coupled with the object itself becomes a new kind of media. Bill Scott calls it a Rich Internet Object.
Luke goes on to suggest that the principals of object-oriented programming would be instructive in the creation and distribution of RIOs.
This sounds like the Semantic Web to me, aka Web 3.0. Much of the Semantic Web involves the transmission and reception of machine-readable metadata to facilitate findability and insight.
In a world of ubiquitous computing and network connections, RIOs will couple with web services to dynamically update themselves with additional or revised metadata. They will also make themselves known and available, so that they might become part of the metadata for other RIOs.
Maybe we'll have a del.icio.us for machines, a place where autonomous agents post and tag web resources that they found useful in achieving their masters' tasks.
My refrigerator could query a directory looking for recipe services. Once it found some it could talk to, it would identify recipes it thinks I might like (and based, in part, on what I have inside of it). Say I end up using several recipes from the same source, the fridge would note that along with other variables like service availability. It would then post to the machine tagging service, perhaps along with a trust/reliability rating and additional metadata, making it easier for other refrigerators to satisfy their owners' culinary requirements.
My refrigerator, in this example, is a RIO, and so are the recipes and the recipe web services. They are all discreet objects with methods and properties that can be manipulated, amended, and extended.
As the Web evolves into an ecosystem of RIOs, interface designers and information architects will take on the role of information ecologists.
