It’s a lot harder writing a blog as an individual than as a Chief Executive.

As a CEO, you have an obvious and explicit agenda in nearly all communications – drive awareness for the company, its products and ideas. The same applies across internal and external audiences (the notion you can separate audiences is comically antiquated – ubiquitous social media renders listeners just as powerful as speakers).

As an individual, my agenda isn’t nearly so clear (at least one reason it’s taken me so long to post a first entry). On the one hand, I’d like to put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun. There was almost always more going on behind the scenes than was obvious to the outside world, and some of that backdrop might be interesting.

Could probably fill a book.

Cartoon by Hugh MacLeod @gapingvoid on Twitter and gapingvoid.com

Click on the image above to read the entire post, but here's an excerpt.

This first blog entry started something of a trend at Cisco. We now have internal blogs “out the wazoo” (I believe is the technical term). And, we now have 16 “corporate blogs” that you can access on Blogs.Cisco.com. Topics range from High Tech Policy (our first blog), to corporate stuff (this one), to mobility, to collaboration, to Service Provider, to Security, etc.

Over the past five years, we have grown our social media presence, we have added a Cisco YouTube channel for the all-important medium of video, we have added a corporate @CiscoSystems Twitter account (actually MANY Cisco Twitter accounts), we have an active Cisco Facebook account and we are experimenting with other social media like Flickr, UStream and more. The net is that interacting with customers, investors, employees, partners and more is important to us. We want to be accessible. We want to talk….and, more importantly, we want to listen.

Congratulations, Cisco. We're following you.

You're invited to go here and vote for your favorites.

In addition, these Intellectual Property law bloggers should garner a good number of "write in" votes:

• Jeremy Phillips at IPKat
• Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion
• Dave Donoghue at  the Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Duncan Bucknell at IP Think Tank
• Stephen Albainy-Jenei at Patent Baristas

They're all winners as far as we're concerned.

Once the blog is made public, hopefully, the United States Patent and Trademark Office will reach out to its followers via Twitter, as well, @USPTO thanks to the foresight of @jmattbuchanan at Promote the Progress, who continues to hold that username for the USPTO to utilize as soon as the leadership is ready to take full advantage of this new communication channel as has the President and so many other government departments and agencies.

Dave Donoghue is one of a cadre of leading intellectual property law bloggers that have signed on recently to guest blog on the top patent blog, Patently-O. Also guest blogging this month, on Dennis Crouch's Patently-O, are many of the other top patent bloggers: Kevin Noonan of Patent Docs, Brett Trout of BlawgIT, Stephen Albainy-Jenei of Patent Baristas, and Joff Wild, Editor of IAM Magazine and the IAM Blog. Dennis has even got intellectual property blogger emeritus Jeremy Phillips grinning like a Cheshire cat at the prospect of writing an article for the top patent blog.

It's great to see this worldwide collaboration among the top patent blogs; bloggers who have learned the art of guest blogging and are showing others how it's done.

Here on Securing Innovation, IP.com is committed to a collaborative IP blog that is an integral part of the community of intellectual property professionals, attorneys, patent agents, examiners, strategists, and advisors. It's with a spirit of collaboration and mutual support that we've designed our corporate blog to feature a Guest Blogger with a prominent placement, rather than following the standard practice of including the guest blogger among the regular posts. This design gives the Guest Blogger a higher profile for a longer period than is usually the case on other blogs that publish guest authors. Contributed articles on Securing Innovation are also included in the permanent Guest Blogger Archives with a distinctive RSS feed for these featured articles. Looking at the lineup of featured guest bloggers, it makes a lot of sense to subscribe to this Guest Blog and add it to your favorite feed reader.

So far, we've featured the following Guest Blogger articles on Securing Innovation:

Remember Mr. Murphy When it Comes to Protecting Intellectual Property by Jason Shinn

Saving Your Intellectual Property by John Avellanet

Are Patents A Driver of Innovation or Just a Tax? by Stephen Albainy-Jenei

Should Management Be Involved In Patenting Decisions? by Clifford D. Hyra

Vote for the Top Patent Blogs by Gene Quinn

Technology Transfer Office Uses Workflow Software to Boost IP Management, Marketing by the Editor of Technology Transfer Tactics

August Carnival of Trust by R. David Donoghue

We're open to suggestions from bloggers who would like to be featured as a Guest Blogger here on Securing Innovation, the corporate blog of IP.com While we're not Patently-O and can't boast the traffic of, say, Patent Baristas, we are always keen to collaborate with IP Bloggers who have something interesting they'd like to share with readers of Securing Innovation and clients of IP.com who follow our corporate blog. We expect that several of the executives of our clients and customers, some of whom don't even have blogs, will want to publish an article in this forum of intellectual property professionals.

Got an idea for a post that you'd like us to publish or cross-post on Securing Innovation? Send an email to blog@ip.com and we'll be happy to discuss it with you. Nice people, we love cats and dogs.

Sometimes, though, we wonder if those who subscribe to one or more of these RSS feeds aren't missing the big picture.

And, by that, we don't mean just the professional design of our company blog, created for us by the talented team of legal and corporate communications specialists at LexBlog. We're talking about the total picture, the way the company blog organizes content and presents an organic arrangement of information, each segment of the blog interacting with and complementing the other.

In additon to the main posts of this company blog, where we write about managing intellectual property, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, we've added a sidebar column of "Quick Links" that is sort of a "clipping service" where we link to blog posts and news articles that are of interest to us at IP.com and, perhaps, to our readers. Some subscribers get our Quick Links in a separate RSS feed from this blog. Others might not have noticed it's a separate feed.

Also in the sidebars, we've collected links to several IP Resources as well as to many of the leading intellectual property blogs, tech blogs, and business blogs. This is the community of intellectual property professionals with which we at IP.com are engaged, not only online but in real-world interactions, email, telephone discussions, and face-to-face meetings. Among the many intellectual property resources in the sidebars of this blog, you'll find links to the top patent blogs, and more.

Notably, we've added a "Guest Blogger" column, prominently featured in the top left of the front page, where the contributions of other specialists and leading practitioners of intellectual property law and policy present viewpoints beyond our own perspectives.

What Is IP.com, and why read our blog?

When this blog began, Tom Colson, CEO of IP.com, introduced the company to the blogosphere and discussed why we believe in business blogs.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

Find the conversation. Join it. Contribute to it. "Conversing is how we learn. It's how we network. It's how we grow as professionals," says Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, whose team of experts guided us in the development of our corporate blog, "Blogging is a conversation. Not only do you learn and grow your reputation by joining in, you will not be conspicuous by your absence."

Since adding social networking tools to our corporate communications, we've worked continuously to improve the layout and design of the company blog to better engage in these conversations, adding new features as we grow.

Convergent Media

Where once the tools of corporate communications were press releases and newsletters, corporations today have continuous conversations with their clients, customers, and stakeholders. A press release or, better yet, an article based on the news in the press release, is posted on the corporation's own media channel, the company blog. Corporate executives, clients and customers read about it on the blog, or in their feed readers, and tweet about the news on Twitter, visiting the company blog to comment on the article.

 Click on the graphic link above to see how the CEO of Zappos recently announced the sale of the company to Amazon, in a letter to the employees posted on the company blog and to the followers of @zappos on Twitter, all 1,030,194 of them. Now, we're not a startup shoe seller, but there's lots we can learn from them. In the Twitter stream in the sidebar of our company blog and on Twitter @ipdotcom is where we put what we've learned about convergent media into practice.

If you've got a favorite RSS feed reader, be sure to add all our blog's feeds to those you're following. But don't then forget to stop by the blog, as well, to see what else is going on here. It's a work in progress, and we welcome your comments to make it more interesting and informative.

Please let us know in the comments below how we can make this company blog a helpful place on the internet for you to get the latest information about intellectual property. Did I mention that we're linked to IP Newflash from the company blog? Oh, you saw that. Wonderful.

In any event, it's interesting to observe how masterfully Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz used his corporate blog in the weeks ahead of this breaking news, in his words, "to set out a clear direction of where Sun's headed."

In a series of posts that coincide with news of a possible acquisition by IBM, Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz combined the use of personal video embedded into his blog with transcripts of his detailed description of Sun's strategic imperatives:

1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.

Jonathan Schwartz sets up the series of three substantive posts with these words:

As you know, simplicity takes a lot of engineering, so it's easy to say "just three things," but I'm not in any way suggesting these tasks are easily accomplished. But our intent is to create, promote, and commercialize the highest quality network innovations. Innovations that captivate developers, and deployers.

To understand Sun, you have to understand both, you have to see what drives our financial performance, as well as read our financial statements. Absent both perspectives, you'll miss the bigger picture, the bigger threat, or the bigger opportunity.

Simply brilliant corporate communications.

Might the real "plum" in this acquisition be Jonathan's Blog?

Check this out:

Speculation is rife that IBM is closing in on a $6.5bn deal to acquire Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. If it happens it will become the largest acquisition in the blogosphere to date, and lend weight to the argument that Sun Microsystems’ CEO was right to spend so much of his time blogging...

Patently-O

Patent Baristas

IPWatchdog 

Against Monopoly 

Patently Silly 

Chicago IP Litigation Blog 

PHOSITA 

Spicy IP 

PLI Patent Practice Center 

Duncan Bucknell Company’s IP Think Tank 

Patent Prospector 

Securing Innovation 

Peter Zura’s 271 Patent Blog 

The Invent Blog

Promote the Progress 

I/P Updates

IP NewsFlash 

Orange Book Blog 

The IP Factor 

Philip Brooks' Patent Infringement Updates

Patent Docs 

Anticipate This! 

Patent Fools (now operated by IPWatchdog.com) 

Patentably Defined 

Steve van Dulken’s Patent Blog 

IP Spotlight

To discover how Gene Quinn determined these top blogs from Technorati's rankings of the top million blogs, read the IP Watchdog post here. And for more IP Blogs, including patent blogs too new to have risen among the ranks of these more established blogs, please check out the many others linked in the sidebar in the left column of our blog, Securing Innovation.

Obviously, we're delighted to find our intellectual property blog in such fine company. Thanks to everyone who has kindly linked our blog and introduced us to their readership. We appreciate that our blog has risen rather quickly in its first year in the blogosphere, and to unexpected heights, on the shoulders of giants. Thank you.

Securing Innovation also got a lot of link love when we hosted Blawg Review #179, which highlighted the best of the intellectual property blogosphere while commemorating the invention of the ballpoint pen. We're especially grateful for the generous comments from Victoria Pynchon regarding our relatively new blog.

If we have achieved such heights, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, and we'd like to acknowledge the support of those bloggers in the intellectual property community who have kindly added a link to Securing Innovation in the blogrolls of their well-regarded blogs.

• The Legal Thing, by Mike Dillon
• Patent Baristas, by Stephen Albainy-Jenei
• Patent Docs, Donald Zuhn, Kevin Noonan, Chris Singer, and Sherri Oslick
• The Invent Blog, by Stephen Nipper
• Green Patent Blog, by Eric Lane
• Infamy or Praise, by Colin Samuels
• May It Please the Court, by J. Craig Williams
• Likelihood of Confusion, by Ron Coleman
• Anticipate This!, by Jake Ward and Mike Dockins
• IP ThinkTank, by Duncan Bucknell

Without them and many others who have, from time to time, shared our posts with their readers, we could not have had such a successful first year of blogging. It's really been more than we expected.

We've learned a lot and we're continuing to pick things up as we go. And we're adding new features to make this blog even more useful, to us and our readers. More about that in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy as much as we do the many useful IP Resources, Tech Blogs, Business Blogs, and IP Blogs that are already linked in the sidebar blogrolls here on Securing Innovation. If you think of others we should link, please let us know in the comments below. Thanks for all your help.

Colin Samuels at Infamy or Praise said our Blawg Review #179 is the greatest thing since Blawg Review #178.

Stephen Albainy-Jenei at Patent Baristas linked to Blawg Review: The (BIC®) Pen is Mightier than the Sword Edition.

Ron Coleman at Likelihood of Confusion® introduced his readers to our presentation like this:

This week’s edition of Blawg Review is at Securing Innovation! And what could be more innovative, or more secure, really, than the item at the top of the post: The good old ball-point pen, in honor of this week’s birthday of Laszlo Biro!

Victoria Pynchon at The IP ADR Blog had these kind words:

Today, Securing Innovation celebrates the invention of the ballpoint pen in Blawg Review #179 here. SI is one of the best IP blogs to appear on the scene in some time and I don't link to it nearly enough. With Blawg Review #179 I'm hoping that S.I. will begin to get the readership it deserves -- like -- a MILLION unique hits a year -- that's how essential it is to the IP practitioner.

We've got a long way to go to reach those numbers but we're thankful to law blogs who do, like Above the Law and Overlawyered and Point of Law, for including links to our Blawg Review and sending many of their readers over here to our company blog. Thanks to these thought leaders, and mentors like Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog, we enjoyed our busiest week ever on the Securing Innovation blog.

We hope that some of those who visited us to check out Blawg Review #179 took a look around our corporate blog and company website to find out what IP.com is about and what we offer to the community of IP lawyers and their clients who have intellectual property assets under management. If you find what we're blogging about here on Securing Innovation might be interesting for your blog readers, we'd really appreciate if you might add our link to your blogroll. And, before you go, please check out ours which includes many intellectual property, technology, and business blogs we think are definitely worth a look.

German-American Day is the theme of this week's Blawg Review #180 at LawPundit, where Andis Kaulins, an American expatriate, born in Germany, raised in the United States, and formerly lecturing on Anglo-American law at the University of Trier Law School, takes note of the Quick Links here on Securing Innovation.

The editor of IP.com's corporate blog, Securing Innovation, points to a recent article at Law.com, German Court Sees First Signs of European Patent Trolls, by Philippa Maister of IP Law & Business, and is concerned about the likelihood of confusion with IPCom GmbH in connection with the German company's whopping 12 Billion Euro patent infringement lawsuit against Nokia.

Make no mistake about it, our company IP.com has nothing to do with a German IP licensing company IPCom GmbH & Co. KG that is demanding billions in patent licensing fees from Nokia.

Check out this week's Blawg Review #180 and, if you've got a blog of your own, please take a few minutes blogging to share some link love to reward Andis Kaulins for his extraordinary presentation.

If you like the current issue of Blawg Review and think your blog readers might find something interesting in it for them, please don't hesitate to link to it. I'm sure those who hosted Blawg Review will definitely appreciate your thanks.

For our readers who might be unfamiliar with the carnival of law blogs, Blawg Review is the blog carnival for everyone interested in law.

A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special theme of that issue of Blawg Review. The host's personal selections usually include several that reflect the character and subject interests of the host blawg, recognizing that the regular readership of the blog should find some of the usual content, and new readers of the blog via Blawg Review ought to get some sense of the unique perspective and subject specialties of the host.

This isn't the first time it's been hosted on a business blog. Anita Campbell recently hosted Blawg Review #177, her third time hosting the so-called carnival of law blogs on her award-winning Small Business Trends blog.

And it's not the first time Blawg Review has been hosted on an Intellectual Property blog. Earlier this year, on National Inventor's Day, patent attorney Stephen Nipper hosted Blawg Review #146 at The Invent Blog to celebrate Thomas Edison's birthday

Just last week, Blawg Review #178 was hosted by Peter Black, a lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology on his blog, Freedom to Differ, and before that, the Chicago IP Litigation Law Blog played host to an Olympic-themed presentation of Blawg Review #173. Intellectual Property dispute mediator Victoria Pynchon hosted an outstanding Blawg Review #171 at the IP ADR Blog.

So, you see what we're up against. If you don't think coming up with the next best Blawg Review is Hell, you haven't seen the law blog carnivals inspired by Dante, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, that earned Colin Samuels at Infamy or Praise three consecutive awards for Blawg Review of the Year.

"O, woe is me, t'have seen what I have seen, see what I see!"

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." -- Charles M. Schulz

Blawg Review #178 is being hosted today (or tomorrow) at Freedom to Differ, the law blog of Peter Black, a lecturer at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Peter’s research interests focus on legal issues relating to the regulation of the media and the internet. He is a regular contributor to the Internet Law Bulletin and The Business of Law from FindLaw Australia. Peter currently has a contract with Idea Group Publishing to edit a book with Kelley Burton titled Legal and Political Issues of Blogging: Surviving in the Blogosphere.

It's perhaps not surprising that Peter Black was scheduled to host Blawg Review on this day. Monday, September 22, 2008 is also One Web Day:

OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet. So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

To learn more about One Web Day click on this link.

Next week,  on Monday, September 29, 2008, Blawg Review #179 will be hosted here on Securing Innovation, the business blog of IP.com and, as those familiar with Blawg Review might anticipate, we plan to create a special theme for our presentation that will make perfect sense to everyone interested in patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, innovation management, and intellectual property law and policy. If you've written a blog post in those areas that you'd like us to include in next week's carnival of law blogs, or if you come across something next week on a lawyer's blawg or a company's business blog that you'd like to recommend, please send us a link following these Submission Guidelines for Blawg Review.

Taken at face value, entering posts on the blog is very easy. It looks like an online word processor which enables you to publish your articles and make them available online as well as manage a few options and features. However, this is a lot more complex than you think. Not necessarily from a technical point of view, but certainly from an Internet writing skills point of view.

What we're doing at IP.com might not change the world (or maybe it will) and we certainly don't position our company at the center of the universe, but it's probably not an exaggeration to say we're changing the world of intellectual property.

In our little corner of the online world, there's a lot happening with patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, and a lot of relevant stuff is being said on interesting blogs by people who really know what they're talking about. So we're joining the conversation, and blogging about how innovation is managed by corporations with a vested interest in their Intellectual Property.

• Patent Baristas
• Likelihood of Confusion
• Patent Docs
• The Invent Blog
• The Patent Prospector
• Anticipate This!
• BlawgIT
• The Legal Thing

• Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Contemporary Intellectual Property, Licensing & Information Law
• Maryland Intelllectual Property Law Blog
• Patent Trademark Blog
• IP Law Chat
• The IP Law Blog
• Australian Trade Marks Law Blog
• Intellectual Property Law Blog
• IP Litigation Blog
• The IP ADR Blog

• Write for Clients by business writer and communications consultant Lori Herz
• Corvette Blog by George Matick Chevrolet
• Blog Crystal for the Crystal Mountain Ski Area
• eDiscovery Source by RenewData
• True Gotham by The Heddings Property Group
• The Retirement Plan Blog by National Benefit Services
• The Farm at Tralee Journal about Tennessee Equestrian Real Estate
• Pension Risk Matters published by Pension Governance
• The Adventure of Strategy by Rob Millard
• Business Memory Blog

Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. We need to do a better job of telling the world. As of now, you are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first (but please do read and follow the advice in this note). Blogging is a good way to do this.

As they'll tell you themselves, the opinions and interests expressed on IBMers' blogs are their own and don't necessarily represent this company's positions, strategies or views. But that doesn't mean we don't want you to read them! Because they do represent lots of business and technology expertise you can't get from anyone else.

Many other companies use blogs to connect better with their customers through blogs. Blogs that are written by living breathing employees, not the PR department.