If you thought that last week's column would be the end of the Pop!Tech reports, think again. I have loads of material. Like many at the show, I was particularly eager to see Bruce Sterling speak. Although he stopped well short of his allotted 20 minutes (boo!) his presentation was filled with hilarious neologisms (yay!), many of which he first coined in his book "Shaping Things." It is worth picking up.

Part primer for budding industrial designers and engineers, part green manifesto for techno-social evolution, "Shaping Things" is hard to pin down. Although Sterling does get carried away with his own inventions, at times becoming positively rhapsodic, you never get the sense he is making this all up

As befits a book on design, "Shaping Things" isn't a conventional text. The slick pages pop with color and highlighting thanks to the creative design of Lorraine Wild of Green Dragon Design Office. It is safe to say that this book wouldn't be nearly as compelling without her involvement. Icons are dropped in as necessary, and the connection between words is often sketched directly onto the page. Perhaps the most effective design touch is the use of unique fonts for each of Sterling's key terms: Artifacts, Machines, Products, Gizmos, and Spime.

These terms represent the entire history of human-object relations. Artifacts are simple artificial objects that are made by hand, used by hand, or powered by muscle, including everything from arrowheads to simple hammers. Machines are complex artifacts with moving parts that require a specialized structure for manufacturing and support. Products are widely distributed objects manufactured in massive quantities using assembly-line techniques and transported over a vast infrastructure to consumers. And Gizmos are highly adjustable multi-featured objects that offer lots of functionality to end users, but usually carry a substantial cognitive load and monetary price for users. Obviously, overlap exists here, but the distinctions are useful and relatively easy to understand. Then... there is Spime.

Spime is a term invented by Sterling, which, when you think about it, works as well as anything else. He defines Spime as "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system." RFID technology plays a big role in the process--identifying, labeling and tracking items--but that's just the process. At its core, a Spime begins and ends as data. Given unlimited storage, unlimited processing power and unlimited resources, Spimes will enable us to know nearly everything there is to know about the products we create.

It's a tough concept to wrap your mind around, but that is why Sterling dubs people within an infrastructure of Spimes as "Wranglers." It is his most sincere hope that, in an age of Spimes, we will be able to make better decisions about the world we live in. If you knew, for example, than one cell phone had twice as many toxic metals as an another, that might affect your buying decision. Spimes are sustainable, ideally because they can be recycled and because they will carry information about their costs (environmental, societal, political, humanitarian, and so on) with them as part of their identity.

Spimes are currently visions of the future, but the building blocks are here today. UPC codes identify everything from wine bottles to cigarette lighters. From Wal-Mart to the Department of Defense, organizations are using RFID tags to track millions of objects. And, although there isn't quite a grassroots movement to do all the legwork involved in determining the costs and benefits of every individual Spime, we do have Wiki. Can Spime be far behind?