Patent ID: 6907568

Claim:
A method of providing access to objects on a computer network comprising the steps of: initializing a phicon, said phicon comprising a machine-readable tag having a resource identifier encoded thereon, said resource identifier identifying a memory location at a provider server, said initializing step comprising the sub-steps of: presenting the phicon to a phicon-reading appliance; contacting the provider server using the resource identifier read from the phicon by the phicon-reading appliance; creating a network object at the memory location identified by the resource identifier; placing at least one pointer in the created network object, said at least one pointer identifying at least one data object, whereby the created network object can provide access to a plurality of data objects having arbitrary sizes; and accessing the at least one data object using said initialized phicon, said accessing step comprising the sub-steps of: presenting, by an accessing user, the phicon to the phicon-reading appliance; contacting the provider server using the resource identifier read from the phicon by the phicon-reading appliance; and presenting to the accessing user the at least one data object identified by the at least one pointer, whereby the accessing user may interact with the at least one data object identified by the at least one pointer.