Slashdot Mirror
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."
It seems Slashdot will soon owe royalties to Amazon..
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Well I'm not sure if the patent will be approved as is but I must admit that I like to idea behind the service. Most notably I enjoy the RSS feed integration, that's something that more people really need to start using. As for the patent, seems alittle broad to me but that's why you need to get these things approved.
It sounds like they are talking out of their blurb authoring pipeline
So this is the age when we change a letter of an already annoying idea, patent it, and sue everyone who infringes? Soon I will patent this new idea I had called pife -- it's when you are born, live and grow up, become a productive member of society -- but it's different than life because it's more personal and it's branded with my own special logo, and ongoing product placement using cranial implants.
Soon you will all bow to me!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No entry found for plogging.
,
.
Did you mean plugging?
yes these new words annoys me , but what annoys me more is companys trying to get stupid patents
"According to a note on Amazon.com, the Plog is a diary-type feature of the users' shopping experience. "]It will help] you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.""
So its an information system based on your previous purchases, Im sure many catlog order companys have been doing this for years , with target special offers etc
Plus im sure several advertising companys have with tracking cookies and other forms of spyware , been doing the same thing to provide ads that may intrest the customer/victim
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Amazon is really pushing its APIs to open-source developers and is trying very hard to become part of the open-source community. Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly sat side by side at OSCON to tout how small developers could use Amazon's API to make lots of money. This worries me.
Amazon combines Plogs, Reviews, and One-Click and gets a patent on Prick.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
They are patenting concepts. They are not even patenting theories or ways to implement concepts, they are patenting concepts. It's like patenting the very concept of a flying car itself, instead of patenting an implementation of the concept.
I think its more fair... Medicines for one, a Lab should be able to patent a process to achieve certain compound. But not be able to patent the compound formula... if some poor country find a way to produce the medicine, the Lab would not be alowed to charge for royalities... unless they're using the patented process to make the medicines.
Take a look at the HIV case here at Brasil, the governament tried to produce generic medicines, to distribute among the population for FREE, but the Labs couldnt allow that, and sued the governament. When the Labs were about to LOOSE the case, they lowered the price of the meds to a fraction of the original cost, so would be cheaper for the governament to buy the meds, instead of produce them!!!
What I mean is, patents doesnt suck. What is wrong is the way theyre used nowdays.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
I am the leader of an open-source (GPL) effort to create a truly multi-user and multi-blog blogging tool built on PHP and called pLog. Even though it's an ugly name, it stands "PHP Log" and has nothing to do with Amazon's patent whatsoever. But the question is... Should we start worrying about this now? I mean, can we expect Amazon's lawyers coming after us because our project name and the name of their patent sound too similar? We've been in Sourceforge since June 2003 (if that counts)
We'd like to keep our name because it's been our identity for almost 2 years now but we cannot affort legal litigation (being a free community effort, etc)
I'd like to announce that I've patented the following technologies, and everybody who makes use of such concepts must now pay me an annual fee starting ar $500,000 per year.
WLOG (TM)
A whining blog. Log in, bitch all day about traffic/technology/your boyfriend/your tatoo/your parents/your friends/school. Under this new concept, users will be able to whine more fast and more effectivelly than ever, thanks to our Instant-Whine(TM) technology that allows for up-to-the-second bitching about the upcoming issues.
SLOG (TM)
The server blog. With this breakthrough concept, now servers (and other applications) themselves can write blogs about what's happening to them. We find this kind of blog will be most interesting to system administrators and aficcionados alike. You'll fully understand the advantages of this system when you read your server's SLOG (TM) and find entries such as "I'm feeling bored today. I took 10.6231 seconds to process the last data backup. I had to rewrite 12731312kb of old files in the process. Those people can't create new files or what?".
DLOG (TM)
The dead blog. Create once, never post anymore. We think we can make big bucks with this tech, as most blogs effectively become a DLOG sooner or later. With our post lock feature, you can force your own blog to become a DLOG (TM) and never be able to post on it anymore.
SPLOG (TM)
The spam fest blog. This is actually an improved version of DLOG (TM); it not only makes your blog dead, but also leave comments open for comment spammers so they can build up their google rankings. Enjoy having thousands of posts about free onl1ne poker, v1agra and pen1s enlargement on your 6-words "I'm feeling bored" post.
This is just a preview of the many technologies we're creating that enable YOU - the user - to blog more effectively than ever. Stay tooned for several new exciting releases in the future.
'plogging'?? This is the sort of gratuseless neologism that's making modern webontent so incomprusing. Why can't they use ordular, regdinary words that we've all heard of? Why must they inventorate these mad brandologues, taking the initialet of a well-known verbagos and sticking it haprandom onto a pointuculous wundragubbin?
This frumblotionary addlepoopery is threatening to grurmstipth crumbobblious fremd eebree zorn frell completely and utterly INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
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.
How many of us do something other than discuss it on slashdot, and dont bother communicating with the people who can actually change it? It's not as though many people (if any) here are running for office that could change things like this: so who is?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
as opposed to..........?