Connecting More: People and things

We're at a cusp of a new phase of the Internet, where an extremely large set of non-computers are going to be nodes in this vast network. Those new entities will be people having their own real estate (i.e. domains), and devices that have just enough electronics to communicate in there.
I've got a post with Justin Hayward on the Telnic Blog talking about this "Internet of Things", and how the first step is necessarily discoverability: how a newly arrived node says "hello, I'm here and that's what I can give you."
I can't wait for my garden sensors to tell me that this area of the lawn is too wet and the water isn't filtering down, before the lawn turns yellow and exceedingly ugly (true story).