The *Real* Semantic Web

Mike Masnik at Techdirt shows how various WebCos are trying to patent words in webspace - here is Amaxzon with "blurbs":

The details show that the patent is for personalizing these "blurbs," but it's difficult to see what's patentable here. Reading through the claims, there doesn't seem to be anything that's new here. All it's really doing is creating personalized blogs based on a combination of external blog content, catalog content and user reviews. In other words, it's aggregating a personal feed of content from a variety of sources

(Didn't Technorati do Blurbs...will Amazon sue?)

This joins Google with "Snippets":

"methods and systems for generating textual information,"

..and there was Flickr with "Interestingness". I wonder if Twitter has patented "Tweets" ?

It is actually a bit worrying with all these Web Co's trying to pass off their various messaging processes as patents - but its even worse that they are trying to patent them with naff words

I suspect this marks a new wheeze in patent lawyerdom - given that you probably can't patent the messaging per se due to prior art, or trademark the words, you can patent the combo of process and word you use to describe it.

Anyway, its very clear that we will be probably having semantic skirmishes fairly soon as no doubt everyone will rush to patent their semantic shiftiness

So this is how the Semantic Web will be done.....