My Summer Law Blog Project

Each summer I try to get a substantial web project launched. And like last summer, this post should add some transparency to that work, and describe some of the directions taken.

As of yesterday, my firm launched the Canadian Trademark Blog. It’s a collaborative blog approach, similar to slaw, mixing the perspectives of a solicitor, litigator and trade-mark agent. If you read the official first post, you can see that we’ve tried to define the blog in a focused way, but also leave room to provide commentary on other related topics & disciplines. To me, both are very important elements for a blog’s success.

While this is our first formal blog, we do use web log technology behind the firewall. That said, each of the bloggers is relatively new and will need to build blogging into their routine. The initial goal is to have each of them post at least once a week. Again, a lesson I’ve learned from participation here at Slaw.

In preparation, we did a few sessions on RSS, and our Knowledge Services department will work with them to build personalized custom RSS collections, so they can watch:

• Related IP Law Blogs
• Blogs from Target Markets
• Trademark Disputes & New Cases
• Vanity Feeds – to watch incoming links from other websites & blogs
• CIPO Announcements
• Related Technorati tags

For some of these resources (eg. CIPO) there wasn’t a publisher driven feed, so I ended up creating one using an html scraping tool (see FeedTier as an example).

For metrics, I’m again using Feedburner for their feed. I’ll also keep an eye on link counts on Technorati, subscriber counts on Bloglines, and use Google Analytics for the visitor count.

We’ve talked about the fact that provocative posts get noticed, and that they need to add personal commentary whenever possible. We’ve also talked about blog marketing, and getting into the social side of things. Networking behind the blog, or as Steve Rubel calls it, the ‘Underground Blogosphere‘ can a valuable use of one’s time.

But the most important success factor will be …[drum roll please]… finding their blogging voice. As time passes, bloggers become more efficient at the technology, and at logging their thoughts. When a blog stops republishing news stories and starts to provide candid opinion is when I get excited. This can take time, but having worked with Neil, Larry & Karen for the past 8+ years, I think this blog will be worth the wait.