Blizzards, Community, and System Ratings: Weekly Update

In case you missed it, the Washington DC area is covered in snow. I know that blizzard-like conditions are commonplace for our friends in the North but in the DC area virtually everything grinds to a halt when snow blankets the community. Federal offices close, schools close, we’re lucky to have electricity, and driving with local, inexperienced winter drivers is akin to playing Russian Roulette.

But, the Intellogist Team made a promise to share our progress at growing our community, garnering more repeat visits, and creating more involvement within our registered user base and we plan to keep that promise, therefore, I am ignoring the winter weather to bring you this report.

Intellogist had another great week thanks to all of you who believe that a dynamic community can be built around the topic of patent and prior art searching. We are especially appreciative of Dennis Crouch for his mention in Patently-O’s Bits and Bytes.

To ensure consistency, the statistics we provide each week are measured from Friday thru Thursday. Last week, January 29 thru February 4, we saw a lot of activity on the Intellogist website:

• We had 1,148 visits from 942 visitors. In the previous week we had 1,011 visits from 831 visitors. Our goal is to double our traffic to 5,200 visits per month.

• We had 390 visits from returning visitors. In the previous week, we had 339 visits. Our goal is to achieve 2,560 return visits per month.

• Thanks to one user from the UK, MichaelMason, we have a brand new glossary page on Defensive Publication. In addition, he contributed his expertise to the community report on Research Disclosure. Thank you, MichaelMason for getting involved in our community!

• We only received 2 new votes on our Ratings pages for PatBase, QPat, TotalPatent, or Thomson Innovation. The current totals in the Overall Rating category are:
  • 20 votes on PatBase (2 new votes since last week)
  • 12 votes on QPat (0 new votes since last week)
  • 7 votes on Thomson Innovation (0 new votes since last week)
  • 9 votes on TotalPatent (0 new votes since last week)

I am puzzled by the lack of participation on the Ratings pages because rating a system is one of the easiest things you can do as a registered Intellogist user. Plus, it’s a great way to share your experiences with other users and show vendors how you really feel about their systems. We welcome your feedback – please use the comments to tell us why you aren’t using this feature.

To rate a system, click on one of the system links above, log in to Intellogist, and click on the star that best represents your feelings about a system (where 5 stars is the most positive response and 1 star is the least positive response).

To see the current ratings for these systems side-by-side, open the Quick Table Comparisons page, log in to Intellogist, choose the systems listed above, and click “Compare.” The resultant Comparison Table shows information about each of the systems including, near the top of the table, the current ratings for each of these systems.

• We had 29 new users register on Intellogist. What follows is a sampling of our community members. To see the entire list of members, visit our Community Page:
  • TDruan, a Patent Attorney from Massachusetts, USA
  • RonenIP, a Patent Attorney from Israel
  • Kashore, an IP Advisor from Vermont, USA
  • Anjali, a Patent Searcher from Bhutan
  • Alexglee, a Patent Agent from Massachusetts, USA

The Intellogist Team appreciates the support we’ve received since we issued our Call to Action.  If you haven’t already done so, please join Intellogist today and get involved in our community to help us prove that a social network for IP professionals can thrive!

This post was contributed by Intellogist team member Julie Cook.