The world is changing…

As a professional adviser operating in the field of intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyright) and business law, I have a word of advice for my clients and anyone else that cares to tune in. The world is changing (nothing new there) and each of us has a choice. We can sit back and be spectators and lament the good old days or we can embrace change and seek to flourish in a dynamic new environment.

Specifically, the changes that I am talking about are the technological advancements that impact our daily lives, including social media. With that in mind, since I have always been better at participating than laying back, not surprisingly, I have chosen to embrace the change and begin writing a blog!

So, in the wild & wonderful world (www) of social media, where do you start? Okay, so I started with Google and entered my search term “blogging” to see what would result. Not bad… just 53,900,000 results!! Must be popular… I can’t begin to imagine what I have been missing. Scrolling down I selected an entry that suited my adolescent approach “How to Start a Blog — A Step-By-Step Guide for Beginners”. Now we are getting somewhere. Up pops a five step “Dummies Guide to Setting up a Website” complete with the author’s name and the photo of a good-looking, be-speckled young man emitting an aura of technological geekiness. And the copyright was 2012! I was impressed, so I continued.

Since I already had a website I whisked right through steps 1 – 3 on The Basics, Web Hosting and Website Design to the all important STEP 4: EXTRA INFORMATION. As I was reading the heading “WHAT IS A BLOG? DO I NEED ONE?”… I thought to myself JACKPOT!!… until I saw the definition “A blog is a website that’s like a diary” . DAMN! I can’t get my wife to listen to my daily travails, why would anyone else care? Keep scrolling… “a blog is a collection of “posts”. Posts are typically casual pieces of writing and news… appropriate for any group or activity that’s casual or where information is time sensitive news… EXAMPLES : A blog about current events, a blog about the latest technology, and a blog about recovery from an illness.” This could have potential, I thought, since lots of folks are interested in current events and what’s new in technology.

But still the vexing issue kept staring me in the face… “What exactly should this blog be about?”. Back.. click.. click.. click to my search results. I needed to get an expert opinion “Wikipedia”… the definition of “BLOG”. “A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or information site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first…. recently “multi-author blogs” (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, interest groups and similar institutions account for an increasing proportion of blog traffic.”

Suddenly, my intuition about the need to blog had been validated… blogging could be an intellectual exercise through which I could engage an audience on disparate topics that would be of interest to me, my colleagues and ultimately to a growing list of subscribers. As intellectual property and business lawyers and professionals, my colleagues and I have always assisted our clients in better understanding the complicated legal underpinnings that protect technological and artistic advances. Discussing patents, trademarks, copyrights, industrial designs, and trade secrets has historically occurred in one-on-one closed door sessions. Blogging about these important, but often misunderstood, underpinnings would be a means by which we could expand the social bond that we have with our clients with the express purpose of opening the door on those informative sessions to a larger audience. Indeed a multi-authored blog would mean that my colleagues could participate, providing an even greater diversity and level of expert opinion to the posts.

Scrolling further through Wikipedia’s history of blogging I noted that some blogs that focus on particular subject matter even have their own names. Legal blogs are often referred to as BLAWGS!! Not necessarily a flattering name… it could even be the punchline for another bad lawyer joke… what do you call a bunch of boring lawyers opining ad infinitum… punchline – BLAH BLAH BLAWGS! So this blog needed to be more than a treatise on legal issues. Who needed another lawyer joke? But, rather, it needed to be an informal, but informed, commentary on our society, the changes we encounter and how the law interfaces with those changes.

In any event I do anticipate this blog to be topical, informative and interesting (based on solid legal underpinnings) with some practical or business advice at its core. So I hope you will join me and my colleagues as we embrace new challenges and Facebook, Link.In, Twitter and yes ..MAB..our way into the future.
The world is changing