Techdirt reports that shortly after Google was granted a patent for "snippets", Amazon now gets a patent for "blurbs". Snippets here refers to an automated summary of text which can be displayed alongside search results; blurbs are traditionally those short summaries (usually positive) on the backs of books and DVDs, and what Amazon has patented basically boils down to something very similar: short user-written summaries that show up when you browse a catalog.
The funny thing about these two patents (and we're talking about granted patents here, not patent applications) is the fact that both sound like something that has been done for ages. Yes, it's tied to catalogs (in Amazon's case) or search results (in Google's case) but that doesn't really change the fact that we're talking about something that should not be patentable. Hey, maybe I can define "bluppets" as short summaries of blog posts written by users and then patent that?