I saw this great news clip through one of my daily business wires. The source is Ken Rutkowski and he does the KenRadio’s Daily Tech News.

“Yahoo filed a patent claiming that it invented Web 2.0. The patent described here is for a “Dynamic Page Generator” that lets a user to customize a webpage template to displays data drawn from other sources. The application says that the pages served are news pages, giving the
user a custom selection of stock quotes, news headlines, sports scores, weather, and the like. Oddly the examples given in the patent include Web 2.0 offerings similar to Google’s Personalized Home, Pageflakes, Netvibes and even online RSS readers. Yahoo! claims that it did the legwork for Web 2.0 in the late 1990s. If the patent is granted, lawyers could be showing up at the door of Web 2.0 companies to demand cash.”

When I first read this clip, I honestly laughed out loud. When I think of Web2.0, Yahoo is the last company that comes to mind as the “inventor”. Sure, they are present in this space with their newly customized homepages and mainly through their acquisitions of Flickr and Del.icio.us, but I don’t quite know how they are backing their statement that they are the founders of the concept. Any more info on this would be greatly appreciated.

That being said, if the lawyers do find some validity in this claim, start-ups beware.