Re: Eric Hellman's patent application

[Rick Bowes <rbowes@bowesweb.com>]

I think this is a technique that would allow the following to occur...

Imagine that you are reading a book review on a website and instead of
seeing a link to Amazon or Barnes and Noble you saw a generic link that
simply said "buy this book".  Imagine also that you are registered with a
"redirection" site that "knows" all your preferences - such as for buying
books from Amazon or whomever.  Now, when you click the "buy this book"  
button a link is generated containing metadata about the book that you
want (e.g., the ISBN), and that link takes you to the redirection site.

When you arrive at the redirection facility/site, it looks for a cookie on
your machine, identifies you as a registered user of the redirection
facility, and looks up your preference for buying books. Once it knows
your preference, it extracts metadata from the original link and combines
it with whatever other information it has available to create a link
formatted for the chosen vendor.  So....  if you click the generic link it
goes to Amazon, and if I click the same generic link it goes to Barnes and
Noble.

I think the idea is to give users the freedom to use the services they
want to use but not require the original site to know anything about the
user.  A similar approach might be used to allow a user to order a copy of
an article without the website having to know what supplier the user wants
to use.  Of course if the originating site has an affiliate (commission)  
relationship with a particular vendor, that site isn't going to want to
provide generic links!

It also occurs to me that the link from the originating site would have to
provide, in addition to the basic metadata, a default link to be used by
the redirection site in the event that it couldn't identify the user as
one of its registrants, e.g., it says to itself: "I can't figure out who
the user is, so I'll just send 'em to wherever the incoming link tells me
to".

Now probably Eric will tell us that I've got it all wrong, Chuck, but for
what it's worth, that's how I read it!

Frederick (Rick) Bowes, III
Electronic Publishing Associates
email:   rbowes@bowesweb.com
phone:  781-934-7432
efax:     208-728-7917
mail:     PO Box 1637, Duxbury, MA   02331-1637
pkgs:     47 Harden Hill Rd., Duxbury, MA 02332
_____

At 05:41 PM 4/22/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>I wonder if anyone could explain this in language I can understand? I'm
>not sure what Eric was trying to do with this patent application in 1999.
>Maybe Eric will explain?
>
>  Link to Eric Hellman's Patent Pending:
>  See
>  http://l2.espacenet.com/espacenet/viewer?PN=WO0135279&CY=gb&LG=en&DB=EPD
>  Click on the patent number to see the full document.
>
>It seems generic enough to refer to any url parsing/passing variable data
>but I'm not sure I understand it at all.
>
>Chuck Hamaker
>Associate University Librarian for Collections and Technical Services
>Atkins Library
>University of North Carolina Charlotte
>704 687-2825