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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."
It sounds like they are talking out of their blurb authoring pipeline
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
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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"
'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 already give people things based on there history.
e.g. When I'm down the pub I know what beers my friends drink, and if they are drinking something different tonight.
I also know what new papers many friends read and what they are interested in taking about.
How can anyone be granted a patent for this (or even consider putting one forward)
Lets, use the word gossip instead of blurbs.
An electronic catalog system provides an interface for users to author and post pieces of content, referred to as gossip The gossip submitted by a particular author are made available for viewing in an any format you like.
gossip may also be obtained from external sources, such as the post man, or a news paper.
A personalized gossip selection component selects gossip to present to users based on histories of catalog items selected by such users, and/or based on various other criteria.
We call this the postman.
The gossip selected for a particular user are presented within a personal log or "plog," which may be updated daily and will typically contain entries from many different authors.
We call this the bartender.
User feedback provided on specific gossip is taken into consideration by the personalized gossip selection algorithms.
We call this the mothers meeting.
Looks like Amazon is patenting the wheel.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.