tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

 A couple weeks back, we announced a partnership with Socialvibe. As the blog owner, you get to pick which charity you support in the gadget configuration - then your blog's visitors are invited to do something (for example: rate a video, watch an ad, sign a petition). Each time they do that something, the advertiser who's sponsoring the gadget pledges a certain amount to the charity you've chosen.

I picked charity: water, and in two weeks my blog's readers have raised nearly 7,500 gallons of water for Charity Water. That's really remarkable, and I hope to see the number continue to go up.

What's been intriguing to me has been the effect it's had on me as the blog owner. I've watched the number climb and check the site a couple times a day to see where it's at. I'm thinking about picking a new charity each month to try and spread the love a bit, but also to re-engage prior visitors. It's a fun exercise, and it's quite fulfilling to know that something so simple can have such a meaningful impact on people who need the help.

If your blog is on Blogger, the link above contains the simple instructions to get started. If you're on WordPress, this article does a good job explaining it in more detail and has links to the WordPress setup (Socialvibe is also a WordPress partner). The Socialvibe site has simple directions for getting started on MySpace or Facebook. Give it a try, let me know what you think  16 sept 2009 Rick Klay





tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

Google gets a patent on reading lists

Google gets a patent on reading lists: "Google will probably protest that the patent they filed on reading lists was defensive. But it's a bad patent, based on an 'invention' that was already out there, being discussed openly on Scripting News at least a year before they filed it. If you can subscribe to a feed, why not subscribe to a collection of feeds? And when an item is removed, you no longer are subscribed to it, and when one is added, you are now subscribed to it.


Google should explain to the RSS community how they supposedly invented this and what their process was. If it turns out that we had prior art, they should tear up the patent and apologize from trying to hijack something that doesn't belong to them.


I worry about big companies doing awful things because they do them. It's dangerous to have Google control so much of the RSS infrastructure, from Feedburner to Google Reader to Blogger. They could easily pass information between those systems without sharing the information publicly. They could, right now, deliver features to users that competitors would be locked out of. All this built on ideas, formats, protocols and know-how that were contributed by others without any limits on how they could be used. And now this patent.

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