Today I am literally swamped. Not misusing ‘literally’ here, I mean my place is besieged by floodwaters, much of the yard underwater, the city engineers responsive but apparently unable to do much until the rain lets up here in Van Rock City — whaddya know, it’s flooding all over the lower mainland… So far, we haven’t suffered much damage besides some stuff we had in the garage, but it’s been buckets of driving round-the-clock fun. A certain elemental tension in the air, a pervasive sogginess in my socks…
In other news that’s all wet, the company that once set the standard for warm and fuzzy relations with its community is acting like yet another bully behemoth. Boris Mann reports that Flickr is patenting interestingness. Next up they can patent good will. He’s disgusted, and so is Stephen Downes. Seems like a dangerous game to play for a company that has benefited so handsomely from its fabulous blogger-karma… perhaps they’ve achieved the requisite dominant status to stop caring. I suppose Web 2.0 really has arrived as a major corporate player…
At least tomorrow I expect to dry out as I fly to warm and sunny climes, though in all honesty I’m far more excited by the program of this year’s NMC Regional Conference in San Antonio. So many of my favorite people will be there, and every time slot will be a difficult decision. Myself, I’m taking another crack at my extended riff on mash-ups, last inflicted on unsuspecting participants at the Utah State Open Education Conference, but with a few new wrinkles. Let’s just say that if things progress as planned this iteration promises to be a lot louder and even less coherent.
Tags: nmc2006reg, biblicaldeluge, soggy
I’m taking a patent out on typos.
I saqw video of salmon swimming in a parking lot… they couldn’t find any open spaces either.
Flickr’s “interestingness” feature confuses me. It’s supposed to be based on some kind of algorithm software. If you read the forum on flickr there is a lot of speculation on how it works (apparently it’s a secret) some people theorizing that it has to do with tags, location, groups and questioning whether on not it has to do with number of views or topic. So now they want to patent it? No one seems to be certain as to just what it is that it’s patenting……..
stay dry. 100mm in a day. that’s a lot of wet. not enough to wash away a patent application, but still…
Thanks for checking in boyz…
Patricia — I am not terribly informed on the subject, but my understanding is that a patent is on an idea, not the actual code or algorithms involved (those pieces would presumably be covered by copyright) that make it a reality. There’s some good discussion of the distinction between patents and copyright in an EdTechTalk episode with Al Essa and Michael Feldstein on the BlackWeb patent that I linked to a week or so back.