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Amazon Pursues Plogging Patent
theodp writes "When it unveiled a beta of Plogs (personalized blogs), a nonpublication request Amazon had in effect prevented the USPTO from disclosing that Plogs were patent-pending. But now you can check out Amazon's patent application for the Personalized selection and display of user-supplied content to enhance browsing of electronic catalogs, which describes how 'blurbs' can be made available in a blog format for viewing by others."
I designed a system called MyNet for users to send email to a system that would add entries to a personal diary page. circa 1995. This was not in production though I made a proof of concept and manually updated a blog (web nikki or diary) in 1995 online for a designer named hachiya, who designed sony's pink bear.
David Blair's waxweb system (also about the same time) also should break parts of this as it included an advanced system allowing users to add annotations to a movie that is broken up into scenes, and edit the movie.
I think if you take apart the patent line by line you will find lots of things that beat it piece by piece, and some which have more than one piece. I don't buy it that these guys invented blogging.
For example Wiki's are based circa 1994 on work from the 80's.
It looks more like the patent describes some things that have been around a while, and some already established techniques to extend them. Maybe some good development in there but not the originality as far as I can see from Amazon to be worth a patent. Not if it is circa 2003.
Anyway, I'm against software patents in general since they seem to act opposite from the way patents are supposed to act, but the main thing here is that if there is going to be such a thing as a software patent it better be something more revolutionary and less obvious to experts in the field at the time, than what they have. I'm tired of seeing "software patents" for things that ought to be laughed out of the patent office if they were based on the physical world. And then you get more into mathematical / algorithmic discoveries which are not patentable for even better (similar) reasons. I wish Amazon would fuck off. They have enough of the fucking pie.
...is that IT'S ALREADY A WORD.
Plog is short for "plastic clog" (as in shoe). You'll see them quite often in hospitals because they're comfortable for standing and very easy to disinfect.