Stephen Downes

This nonsense has got to stop. I mean, really now. How do we fix this, short of completely disregarding the U.S. patent office altogether? Boris Mann says the patent is pretty specific to Flickr's implementation, but this doesn't look specific at all: "A method for determining an interestingness rank for at least one media object, the method comprising: accepting metadata concerning the at least one media object from at least one user; and ranking the at least one media object based at least in part on the number of users who have assigned metadata to the at least one media object."