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Blogging, Tweeting and Facebook have changed the world by making it easier than ever for everyday people to publish and distribute their thoughts and media to the world. The resulting tidal wave of data now offers opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs to build entire new products, services and companies based on processing that data and offering recommendations, analytics and other information products to consumers.

Social data is set to be surpassed in the data economy, though, by data published by physical, real-world objects like sensors, smart grids and connected devices. The United States may have dominated the first basic and the second social stage of the Web, but the Chinese government is moving quickly to make China the world leader in this next stage, the Internet of Things. A major new public/private partnership in Chongqing aimed explicitely at the Internet of Things is just the latest signal.

Remember this day. Today was the day you read that non-human objects, internet connected devices like digital picture frames, web-connected GPS devices and broadband TVs, came online with AT&T and Verizon in greater numbers last quarter than new human subscribers did.

In the race to the mobile internet, the machines have quickened their pace beyond what we humans have, at least in the US. Dishwashers, refrigerators, home heating units and other objects are next in line, then perhaps very widespread tiny sensors - and that's a lot more exciting than it might sound.

A few months ago we wrote about how big-name companies are starting to talk about the Internet of Things - a term for the network formed by real-world objects connected to the Internet - indicating that the idea is picking up speed.

Today Chief Futurist for Cisco Systems Dave Evans appeared on the company's netcast, Talk2Cisco, to answer questions about the next 50 years and beyond via email and Twitter. Turns out one of the world's biggest technology companies is betting the Internet of Things is going to be big.

SAP employee Timo Elliott has unveiled a prototype for an augmented reality business intelligence iPhone app. He emphasizes that it's a prototype, not a supported product. It's not available for download yet, but Elliott gives us a look at what an augmented enterprise could look like.

Elliot released some proof-of-concept mock-ups on his blog earlier this year (see our coverage), but the project is now in development at SAP in the BusinessObjects Innovation Center, which Elliot says is based on Google Labs.

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) - a technology that creates a direct connection from our brains to our computers - is beginning to reach the market via toys and game controllers. In the process, these thought-controlled sensors are inspiring innovations that, for instance, allow you to call someone on your phone by simply thinking about them.

From the first-ever thought-generated tweet, to the U.S. military funding the development of advanced prosthetic limbs, to implantable brain sensors, advancements in BCI are not only transforming the lives of people who are locked in because of total paralysis, but are ushering in an era where we will be able to build the Internet as fast as we can think.

Cloth sensors could make the Internet of Things fashionable.

MIT scientists announced this week that they have created a new kind of fiber capable of detecting and emitting sound. "Throughout their history a key premise has remained essentially unchanged," the research team wrote in Nature Materials, "fibres are static devices, incapable of controllably changing their properties over a wide range of frequencies."

Professor Yoel Fink and team says they've upended that history and have developed a process for making fiber that can act like a microphone or a speaker. As with any new type of sensor, the platform possibilities are intriguing - the degree of personal intimacy (pants with patience, shirts that sass you back) makes this particularly potent.

Wristwatch and apparel maker Fossil is developing a new watch with an open software development kit (SDK) to allow any kind of notifications to be pushed by bluetooth from your mobile phone to a watch display. The company believes it could win the hearts of geeks by combining programability, real-time data and fashion.

Could that get you wearing a watch again? After hearing the company's reasons why a watch could be best suited for certain types of notifications, I went from skeptical to definitely interested. Here's why Fossil thinks a watch is what the real-time web needs.

In the past few weeks, we've touched on a few examples of how events within applications are surfaced in activity streams.

But it's not just applications that can communicate. A developer from Portland, Or. is providing a glimpse of how activity streams can be connected with sensors to keep track of activities in an office buildings.

Mike Leach developed Chatter Bot to show how activity streams can be used to notify people about what is happening in a building.

Imagine a small chip you could plug into any device in your home that would enable it to communicate with your web-based electricity and device management dashboard. Or it could be trained to simply turn the device off at times of day when electricity was particularly expensive.

Such is the vision of the USNAP consortium, a group of companies including GEand Google that seeks to create a standard for the meter-to-device in-home monitoring stage of the promised smart grid. ("Enabling the device ecosystem for the smart grid," is the group's tagline.) USNAP released this week a proposed 2.0 standard spec for small modules that can be connected to devices to render them individually instrumented - measurable and manipulable as discrete sources of data. Where there is plug-and-play data, there is a platform for online innovation.

In a resolution adopted Tuesday, the European Parliament officially endorsed the development of the Internet of Things. This resolution frankly encourages the development of an Internet of Things in the European Union. It even calls on the European IoT Commission to "secure co-financing for the implementation of these technologies" and "continue funding pilot projects."

The resolution also sets out instructions to factor in issues of privacy while building out the European IoT.

"(The European Parliament) takes the view that the development of new applications and the actual functioning and business potential of the Internet of Things will be intrinsically linked to the trust European consumers have in the system, and points out that trust exists when doubts about potential threats to privacy and health are clarified"