Patent Office goes Webby

The non-profit community has had a special romance with a variety of collaborative tools that have often been lumped together under the rubric of Web 2.0. This includes wiki-style collaborative posting, social bookmarking and "voting" on the importance of article or comments alla Digg. Now this sort of public participatory use of the web is going mainstream in an experimental program by the U.S. patent office to involve the public in the approval or rejection of patent applications. Here's the story from this morning's Washington Post. Most interesting, I thought are the comments on "reputation management" and the role it plays in opening up a process like this.