This post has a dual purpose. To ask Amazon to make a change to their website by implementing my idea and then to discuss whether or not me posting it here constitutes prior art when I take them to task for stealing my idea.

First, the idea.

Dear Amazon:
Please stop the purchase of gifts from polluting my recommendations. Just because I buy my daughter an Elefun game doesn’t mean I want you to suggest more. Find me good music instead. There is no point recommending this to me, the TV decides what she wants. Ditto for all the other gifts I’ve bought. Here’s how you do it. Allow my to enter a list of people that I might buy gifts for. I’d also like to enter their birthday and whether or not I’m likely to but them a Christmas present.
Then, when I buy a gift, I will tell you who it is for and you won’t use that in my recommendations. Instead, you’ll email me a month before their birthday/Xmas and tell me what I should buy them. In fact, maybe I should have a tickbox which says “Just send them something to the value of £x just in case I forget”.
OK, that’s it, pretty simple. Get on with it guys, thanks. *

Prior Art
Having this unremarkable idea and deciding to blog about it made me think if a blog post could ever be used as prior art in a patent discussion. Of course, Amazon will always be a good point of reference to discuss this because of their famous 1-click ordering patent.
Obviously, the problem with a blog is that I can change the post date and make it look like I invented 1-click ordering on the day Tim Berners-Lee was born. So you have to think you start on pretty shaky ground. But I suspect there will be some underlying OS date that can act as proof, however difficult to get at that be. I dunno, maybe the bowels of Blogger would provide the clue, I doubt the dates on my webserver would help that much.
Perhaps there needs to be a service for recording your ideas easily (in a Blogger) style but where the date is provable. Oh jeez, there goes another idea I can’t prove the date of.

Website of the day:
Well, given that I am currently languishing at the top of the top ten, I’m going to have to go for my latest bit of INternet fun, NewsBiscuit.

Track of the day:
It is a singular pleasure when great songs you haven’t heard for ages suddenly spring into life with the help of the randomiser, I nearly leapt out my chair to dance in the Student Union bar when Cruisers Creek came on. “There’s a party going on down around here…”

* If you already do something like this then I’m not a chump, you’ve just not made it very obvious