The Craft and Hobby Association's summer convention just wrapped up in Orlando, Fla., where thousands of exhibitors, buyers, designers, publishers and members of the press were on the lookout for the next big thing.

And yet the most intriguing innovation in scrapbooking wasn't on display at the convention, or anywhere else. It doesn't even have a name. It's just a concept in a young designer's sketchbook.

"The device," as 23-year-old Amina Nazari of London calls it, is a recording mechanism and scanner that allows you to tag your most treasured possessions with tiny microchips and record the stories behind them.

Already, RFID (radio frequency identification) microchips are embedded in car keys, tires, department store clothing tags, library books, livestock, "contactless" credit cards, and grocery carts that scan your purchases, eliminating tedious checkouts. Future applications include RFID-enabled refrigerators that warn about expired milk, microwaves that cook a frozen dinner without instructions and, possibly, memory preservation.

Nazari's "device" works like this: An heirloom is marked with an RFID chip, which is scanned by a reader in the base of a gramophone (see photo). You speak into the cone, recording the story of the object, and anyone who scans it again can replay the message or add her own.

"The idea came when I was thinking about why people keep things that they don't really need. This led me onto how objects can have hidden, personal sentimental value," Nazari told me by e-mail.

"It occurred to me that the stories and memories that belong to objects and their owners hardly ever get told. I decided I wanted to create a product that would allow these stories to be preserved and then told again, especially so we can build a picture of the people who owned them [and create] a way to preserve and catalogue family history through people's possessions."

I've thought a lot about how superficial and unimaginative scrapbooking has become, especially my own. If you scan my pages (and the shelves of most scrapbook stores), you'd think that all scrapbookers do is dream, aspire, believe, remember, love, cherish and -- my ironic favorite -- imagine.

Just think how much more authentic our scrapbooks would be if we could embed our pages with tiny transmitters that, when scanned by "the device," triggered recorded memories to accompany the photos, ticket stubs and other ephemera.

The closest thing we have to this right now is a product called SoundsEasy, a voice recorder the size of a small cell phone that uses removable memory cards to store 30 30-second messages. Sounds -Easy was featured last February at the winter CHA convention in Anaheim, and retails for around $45, plus $15 for each additional memory card.

Other manufacturers sell voice recorders that can be attached directly to pages, cards or other projects, but they only accommodate 10 30-second messages and cost between $10 and $15 each. RFID chips cost about 5 cents. The "device" would be much pricier, says Nazari, but with technology developing so rapidly, that's bound to change. Right now, on thinkgeek.com, you can buy an RFID experimentation kit, complete with reader and tags, for $99.

Cost isn't the only barrier to be considered. Privacy is a major concern when it comes to RFID technology. Unlike bar codes, RFID tags can be read through almost anything except metal and water, without the holder's knowledge. A hacker looking to expose the risks of RFID recently drove around San Francisco with a $250 Motorola reader, scanning and cloning tags on passports -- tags that are now mandatory for Americans entering the United States by land or sea from Canada, Mexico, Bermuda and the Caribbean. Scary stuff.

"You've got the possibility of unauthorized people learning stuff about who you are, what you've bought, how and where you've bought it," Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department, told The Associated Press earlier this year. "It's like saying, 'Well, who wants to look through my medicine cabinet?' "

Of course, if the day ever comes when patterned paper can be tagged with radio chips, any hacker driving by my house would see his RFID reader melt down in a minute. Seriously, though, MIT researchers say they've created a new optical tag that can store a million times more data than a similarly sized barcode, without the privacy risks of RFID tags.

When it comes to memory preservation, the more daunting challenge may be in the recording technology, not the tagging mechanism.

Elaine Thatcher is program director for Utah State University's Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, which conducts and provides training on oral history projects.

"Our methods of preserving audio are changing so rapidly that such a chip might be obsolete very quickly if it required any other equipment to make it work," Thatcher said. "But more importantly, I would hate to see people depend on the chip for preserving precious audio, because we don't have any technology at present that will last beyond about five years, at least at the quality level that would make it listenable."

Even the best CDs, which claim a life of 100 years, have not been proven, she says, while standard CDs have been shown to start losing digital data within 18 months of being recorded. The data on a chip would have to be migrated to a new chip or a new technology every few years to keep it safe.

For these reasons, and the potential damage that could occur from tagging an artifact, Thatcher says Nazari's idea would not be good for serious story preservation, and that could be a deal breaker for some scrapbookers.

But for those of us who would like to add more authenticity to our scrapbook pages, preserving the voices as well as the words of our loved ones, smart tag technology may be the next big thing.

E-mail Linda Fantin at features@sltrib.com.