There’s a good article at O’Reilly Net that introduces Zeroconf (“Rendezvous” for all you Apple fans), Mutlicast DNS, and talks a bit about Microsoft’s push for Universial Plug n Play (UPnP).
From the sound of things, Rendezvous has a chance of becoming the standard. But it’s a bit too early to know anything for sure.
It sounds like the open source community could do well by getting behind this. Free time aside, I’d love to play around with this extremely cool technology.