A couple of days ago, I pointed to a patent filed by the Flickr folks for the concept of interestingness. I should have poked around a bit more because there's a related patent filed by the Flickr and Josh Schachter of del.icio.us concerning "media object metadata association and ranking". I'm not a big fan of software patents, but even so, I can't see the new, useful, nonobvious invention here. I also find it odd that these patents reference exactly zero prior inventions on which they are based...compare with Larry Page's patent for PageRank.
...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.