tech-ed collisions

the Net at work

Just heard from a colleague about an unfortunate? release of a new cookbook. It seems a very well known chef who is also an international television personality has just written another book and unfortunately it seems a Word version has escaped from the publisher so it is now flying around the Internet uncontrollably. If this is all true and the leak was accidental, I wonder what happened to the poor person who was responsible. Here's a dilemma for the author - what should he do? He is extremely well known and well liked and very, very successful (ie well off). Here's a suggestion - the book's out now so potentially hundreds of thousands of Net (email) users have it already or soon will. How about making it an 'open source' (excuse the pun) cookbook. Make it Creative Commons or something similar. No doubt many, many people will purchase the high quality print version but why not have a free one too? Give it to the community although as I understand it, the cook in question is already one of the most generous and does an awful lot for people in need already. The Internet is a fantastic thing but this does serve as an illustration of how seemingly naive actions can very quickly get out of control. If this all did happen a number of people will probably have been hurt in some way because of this unfortunate event. Following up on this story - it appears it was a hoax (and also not so new) but it is still makes an interesting hypothetical. What could you or would you have done in if you found yourself in a similar situation - try and recover some of what may have been lost, turn it round and exploit the marketing potential of it through the web's viral marketing reach etc. Cheers, and good cooking.

Filed under  //   Web 2.0   rant  
Posted May 25, 2007

Should this patent be allowed?

A really interesting article on blogs.zdnet this morning reveals a patent application by Apple for podcast navigation. To me it simply amounts to a simple hierarchical navigation structure, the underlying process for which has been around at least as long as IT applications have had menu structures. It appears all you need to do is put some content/context in (ie podcast, episodes etc) and you may have grounds for a patent. I really struggle to see how this should be a patent and am really concerned about the implications of it. Does this mean that if granted, you may be in breach of the patent if you have a similar navigation structure? I was really underwhelmed when I saw the parts of the patent that were published in the blog but really concerned about the implications of it. Some very interesting comments already showing up on zdnet's blog.

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Filed under  //   rant