Monday, February 28, 2000

Tim O'Reilly: "A patent on something like '1-Click ordering' is a slap in the face of Tim Berners-Lee and all of the other pioneers who created the opportunity that Amazon has done such a good job of exploiting. Amazon wouldn't have existed without the generosity of people like Tim, who made legitimate, far-reaching inventions, and put them out into the public domain for all to build upon."

A survey for UserLand.Com members. Do you plan to be a customer of Amazon, or buy from their competitors?

EditThisPage.Com: Top 100 Most Visited Sites: "There are a total of 2999 sites on this server." I guess we'll go over 3000 tomorrow?

About.com Publishing is a new My.UserLand channel.

Edward Luttwak, who I met at Davos, operates an Amazon company, in the real Amazon. He writes "We own and are protecting 180 square kilometers so far but are seeking more money to absorb more land into the operation."

Standard: Amazon.com Patents Enemy-Making Process.

Charlie Jackson takes on Amazon: "So, now you have been notified that someone is violating your patent. What are you going to do about it?"

Tim Bray: "Just move your web servers and corporate structure across the border. We're friendly up here in Canada and whereas the border is quite porous (both ways) to drugs and criminals and pollution, it's a remarkably effective firewall against some aspects of legal silliness. Also we have lots of good computer programmers up here." Thanks Tim!

Lawrence Lee checked this out and found that Amazon had filed and received three patents in Canada.

Denise Caruso: Did Consumer E-Commerce Happen Too Fast?

MSNBC: Tech titans talk but offer few tidbits: "I own about 100 shares of Amazon.com, and I wonder if you can tell me what it is exactly that I own," asked one young woman of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Bezos maintained that she owned a piece of the future. Yeah, our future!

Something positive people can do about patents. Create an intellectual property database like IBM's that documents unpatented prior art, so that lawyers defending against patent suits will be as well-armed as those on the other side.

MIT Technology Review: Software Patents Tangle the Web.

A redesign at blackholebrain gives it a new hard to resist look and feel.

Joern Staby: "We're urgently looking for a solution to serve banner ads on our Manila site."

On Saturday we released the plug-in architecture for Manila. They're like filters for PhotoShop or Quark XTensions. Now Frontier developers can add modules to Manila to make it do things we never intended it to do.

8/22/95: What is a Platform? "The author of an API is offering a challenge, saying 'blow my mind' to everyone who might take a stab at implementing something on top of the API."

The discussion between Jakob Nielsen and myself continues.

Jakob Nielsen is a guest on Slashdot.

WSJ: Traditional companies grab a piece of growing ‘B2B’ pie.

News.Com: Dell develops wireless technology.

Jake Savin participated in the chat for the MSNBC Summit which he says was mostly PR for the companies. They asked Jeff Bezos about patents, he denied having a patent on 1-Click, and wouldn't comment further because it's in litigation. OK. All the more reason to boycott Amazon.

Brent's mom, Maggie Davis now has her own Manila site. She's an engineer at Boeing in Seattle, skilled in XML (!) and looking for a job. (They're on strike at Boeing.)

Byte: Learning Perl, Part 1.

Susan Kitchens: My Dream Garden. "Not very far from me is the Arboretum, where, for under 50 bucks per year, I'm a member and can come and go and wander the grounds as I like (well, during Open Hours). 50 bucks per year is a small amount to pay for all that water and all those gardeners and all the property taxes!" Smart. Why buy when you can rent so cheap?

11/2/95: New Cave Needs Curtain. "It's been proven, websites can make you laugh and can make you cry. We can speak the truth thru this medium. We can teach each other and learn from each other. We can make new friends. Our presences will roam the wires of the web like today's automated worms and web crawlers do."

What is ebXML?

John Lim on Manila. "After accumulating about a month of writings in Webfeet, I realised that several running themes were continuing every day in my weblog. I want to knit them together to form a sub-story. I want to relate different days postings to each other. I want to categorise stories and links to create a richer Web site."

Finally, a picture of Garret P. Vreeland, being attacked by a giant ant.

How To.