I saw this over at Dave Winer’s place this morning so I had to go look see what he was talking about.
Scripting News: “Apple is patenting our inventions, again. Oy.”
THIS is what he was talking about:
Techniques for presenting and managing syndication XML (feeds) are disclosed. In one embodiment, a user can modify how a feed is displayed, such as which content (and how much) is displayed, in what order, and how it is formatted. In another embodiment, a modification regarding how a feed is displayed is stored so that it can be used again at a later time. In yet another embodiment, a user can create a custom feed through aggregation and/or filtering of existing feeds. Aggregation includes, for example, merging the articles of multiple feeds to form a new feed. Filtering includes, for example, selecting a subset of articles of a feed based on whether they satisfy a search query. In yet another embodiment, a user can find articles by entering a search query into a search engine that searches feeds, which will identify one or more articles that satisfy the query.
What is this? This is a patent Apple now holds on…NEWS AGGREGATORS! That’s right. What many of you are now reading this site, and many others on, has been patented by Apple. I can think of only one word to describe this:
NUTS.