Matt Loney's Blog

We have now selected four people from the private beta testing programme we ran before the launch of our redesign, each of whom wins an 80Gb black video iPod worth £259. They are Bruce Tutty and Ben Mahoney, both from London, Gareth Evans from Bath and Alexander Patrakov from the gloriously named Technologicheskaya Street in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

If you missed out then you can still win one of the four MacBooks we're giving away with Intel in the IT Manager Pro Challenge.

And if you're not lucky enough to win one of those, remember that we'll be running our annual Christmas competition again in December with dozens of great prizes.

In my inbox this morning from Theodp and reproduced here verbatim:

"Six years ago, the NY Times hyped the launch of now-defunct BountyQuest, the patent reform lovechild of Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly. Last June, Amazon lobbyist Paul Misener invoked the ghost of BountyQuest, asking Congress to believe that the Bezos-funded company's failure to declare an 'official' winner in an O'Reilly-underwritten contest to debunk Amazon's 1-Click patent proved that 1-Click was novel. Misener made the mistake of going on to boast that no 1-Click prior art had ever surfaced, prompting Rep. Howard Berman to call BS and point out that the USPTO had ordered a reexamination of the patent in May. So we should expect self-proclaimed patent protester O'Reilly to cry foul over Amazon's subversion of BountyQuest and suggestion that Tim himself proved 1-Click was patent-worthy, right? Maybe not. After all, Tim's counting on 1-Click inventor Bezos, lobbyist Misener and other patent-packing Amazonians to entertain the high-rollers next week at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Conference."

Now I have come to love 1-Click, especially when used with something like Google's book search. Find a book, click through to Amazon. Click on the 1-Click button, and that's it. A horribly easy way to spend money, and a great lesson for e-commerce operations everywhere. But I still don't think it should be patenable. I also love the fact that my newsagent recognises me by name when I walk to buy a newspaper; but it should hardly be patentable. It is simply not a novel idea.

Of course I'm ignoring here the whole issue of whether software should be patentable. But we've just launched this redesign and I have a lot of testnig to do on what we think is a pretty novel site with some pretty novel features peppered around it, and which quite frankly we'd be flattered if our competitors tried to copy.

ZDNet UK member David Long (a web developer who's been contracting with us to help build the new site) has been blogging about how to get more out of your ZDNet UK blog, including how to feed it into your Wordpress blog. I'm hoping that we'll be able to bring feeds the other way in due course, and that is on the list of features we'd like to add. In the meantime check out David's post here.

You might notice that the ZDNet UK edit staff are using their full, real names as usernames here. There's two reasons for this: first, so you know who we are and can find us; and second, because ZDNet UK tends to have high Google rankings - once your name appears on our site you tend to rise quickly up the Google search pages.

Of course you may remain anonymous if you wish, but if you want a high ranking on Google then we'd suggest you use your real name. Now this is not an invitation to post ads here or links to ads. That would be against our Ts&Cs, so don't do it!

Update [03 Nov 2006]: Our operations director Mike Barrett, who until this week you would not find on Google, has been testing this. Read the results here, or see them here.

We're all getting used to seeing online applications launch in beta, but less so big editorially driven sites.

So why have we launched in beta? Well, for several reasons. First is that this redesign takes us, we like to think, some way beyond your average big editorially driven site. The community area we have built includes tools for professional networking; ZDNet is now as much an application as a publishing platform, and that means there is still a lot we need to iron out, and a lot we can improve on. Because we've built the platform ourselves it means we can change and improve, so we're very keen to hear your ideas for how we can make it better.

We have had the site in private beta testing mode for some time now, and as with any application, the point at which you open it up to the world is somewhere on a continuum. This continuum runs from major bug fixes to minor feature tweaks; and the point of launch is preferably as far towards the minor feature tweaks end of the spectrum as possible. We know we've still got some minor tweaks to make, and again there is plenty of opportunity for you to have your input. With that in mind we figured it made sense to launch the redesign in beta.

If you click on the button near the top right of every page this will take you to a form where you can give us feedback. Alternatively you can register and send any of the edit team a message through the system.