Thanks wasn't expected, as we hadn't done anything big; just a small favor in sharing with our followers on Twitter, a #FollowFriday or #FF hashtag, recommending they follow the European Patent Office, which is officially @EPOorg on Twitter.

We're grateful that the EPO was thoughtful enough to favor IP.com with their public note of thanks on Twitter. That little social gesture by the folks at the EPO means a lot to us, and we appreciate it.

Some call it the favor economy, and it's evident elsewhere in social media, like @uspto on Twitter. Soon, we hope, the USPTO will be expressing appreciation for the very professional way that Patent Attorneys J. Matthew Buchanan Mandy Sinclair and Stephen Nipper have been maintaining in Trust for the USPTO the username @uspto on Twitter, with the hope and expectation that the United States Patent and Trademark Office will want to have an official interaction with its followers, as do many other government agencies on Twitter. Of all the questions concerning reform at the USPTO, "Why aren't we on Twitter?" isn't the most important, but it's easy to fix.

The USPTO has just announced that it's officially on Facebook where they posted this message from Director David Kappos:

Welcome to the USPTO’s page on Facebook! We're excited to be launching this forum to communicate with you and share the latest news from the USPTO. We know thousands of innovators, members of the intellectual property practice community, and USPTO employees are active on Facebook, so we’re pleased to be able to bring information and updates to you here. But this is also a place where you can tell us what YOU think. We encourage you to comment on our posts and tell us what you “like” and “dislike.” Check back here daily, as we will be providing regular updates including press releases and other news, details on upcoming events, speeches, updates from my blog, photos, video, fun facts and more. Just like checking your Facebook page, we hope visiting our page will become part of your daily routine.

You can also follow David Kappos' public blog Director's Forum on the USPTO website and post comments on his blog posts about the many changes and reforms at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Now that the USPTO is using social media to communicate effectively on the Director's public blog and on Facebook, hopefully it won't be long before the United States Patent and Trademark Office is officially @uspto on Twitter, as well.

Until then, thanks Matt, Steve, and Mandy for all you're doing, without expectations, because it's the right thing to do.

 Not only did the Library of Congress break the news on Twitter; the tweet broke the blog server under a torrent of retweets, causing @librarycongress to apologize, "Sorry, LOC blog having some disruptions. Twitter acquisition story also on Facebook."

Read more about this news from the Library of Congress.

"I think Twitter will be one of the most informative resources available on modern day culture, including economic, social and political trends, as well as consumer behavior and social trends," said Margot Gerritsen, a professor with Stanford University's Department of Energy Resources Engineering and head of the Center of Excellence for Computational Approaches to Digital Stewardship, a partnership with the Library of Congress.

The archive follows in the Library's long tradition of gathering individuals' firsthand accounts of history, such as "man on the street" interviews after Pearl Harbor; the September 11, 2001, Documentary Project; the Veterans History Project (VHP); and StoryCorps. While the Twitter archive will not be posted online, the Library envisions posting selected content around topics or themes, similar to existing VHP presentations.

The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today the Library holds more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office and websites of Members of Congress. In addition, the Library leads the congressionally mandated National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution. The Library seeks to spark imagination and creativity and to further human understanding and wisdom by providing access to knowledge through its magnificent collections, programs and exhibitions. Many of the Library's rich resources can be accessed through its website at www.loc.gov and via interactive exhibitions on a personalized website at myLOC.gov.

The IP.com Journal is the print and CD counterpart to the IP.com Prior Art Database. The IP.com Journal is published twice per month. It contains all disclosures digitally notarized and made available since the previous publication. It may also contain some disclosures which have been marked to appear in the print journal prior to being made available online. The IP.com Journal is just one of the methods that IP.com employs to ensure that disclosures published to our databases are permanent and forever available. Each edition of the journal is distributed to law offices and libraries around the world including, of course, the Library of Congress.

J. Matthew Buchanan, a registered patent attorney who maintains the website "Promote the Progress" and who's @jmattbuchanan on Twitter, registered the username @USPTO  in trust for the United States Patent and Trademark Office, for its official Twitter stream. Not only the USPTO, but intellectual property professionals everywhere, no doubt, appreciate Matt Buchanan's foresight and professionalism.

The European Patent Office already has its official Twitter address @EPOorg and many agencies of the US Government, such as the Federal Communications Commission @FCC, @whitehouse and the President @BarackObama are on Twitter.

From the conversations we've been engaged in with intellectual property professionals on Twitter, there seems to be a consensus that many will follow the USPTO @USPTO as soon as its Twitter account becomes official. Hopefully, that will happen soon. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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.

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.

Padmasree Warrior is Cisco Systems' Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, she is responsible for helping drive the company's technological innovations and strategy, and works closely with its senior executive team and board of directors to align these efforts with Cisco's corporate goals. As an evangelist for what's possible, she pushes the organization to stretch beyond its current capabilities – not just in technology, but also in its strategic partnerships and new business models.

We @ipdotcom are among over a million followers of her on Twitter @Padmasree.

Tom Colson, CEO of IP.com, restated on Twitter @tomcolson a policy for public communications by employees in 140 characters permitted by Twitter for each tweet, as these postings are called by those who are following this emerging social interaction. Tom credits another lawyer, Jay Shepherd, @jayshep for the thoughtful and carefully drafted Twitter policy.

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

As noted by Tom in another tweet this week, he's not the first CEO to embrace Twitter as another effective way to communicate with those following similar interests in his work @ipdotcom and his other interests, which are outlined in his profile on Twitter. An increasing number of executives are now on Twitter. There's even a website called ExecTweets that aggregates their tweets.

Sun Microsystem's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, has been blogging and twittering for well over a year. And this new policy for Twitter is really not new. It's simply a twitterable summary the Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse that Tom Colson adopted in his 2007 blog post about why we believe in business blogs. For all the same good reasons, we also believe in Twitter for business, and encourage employees of IP.com, if they're interested in social interaction on the internet, to join the conversation on Twitter, keeping in mind our policy, which is simply good advice for anyone.

Patent Attorney J. Matthew Buchanan, founder and architect of the patent education portal Promote the Progress, which we follow on Twitter @ptp, was quick to catch this tweet @uspto, where an anonymous benefactor is offering to transfer the @uspto Twitter username to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Jackie Hutter has over 13 years experience in advising innovation-driven corporations, investors and universities on how to maximize intangible asset value by developing and executing on IP and patent strategy. In a post on her IP Asset Maximizer Blog, she says,

I often facetiously refer to myself as a "recovering patent attorney." This somewhat tongue-in-cheek phrase seems appropriate to my present professional state of mind because, after many years of drafting and prosecuting patents for clients of all sizes and degrees of sophistication, in the end, I became disillusioned with the way the patent business traditionally operates.

Too often, I found that the patents I worked so hard (and was paid handsomely) to obtain failed to serve my client's business needs. In searching for the source of the disconnect between my efforts, the client's expenditures and the ultimate value of the patent to my client's business, I realized that those responsible for the client's business often did not participate adequately in the patenting process. Instead, at many organizations, inventors and patent attorneys served as the gatekeepers for most patent decisions. While the relevant client business unit typically held some say in patenting decisions, at many companies, the process effectively operated within a R&D/patent attorney "silo."

Upon reflection, I found this situation akin to the proverbial "fox guarding the hen house" because those with the most riding on the patenting process i.e., R & D managers and patent attorneys, held de facto decision rights as to their company's patents. Patent decision-making at many corporations seemed therefore to often rest on the perceived scientific value of the invention covered by the patent, not whether a patent for that invention served to effectively execute on the client's business strategy. In short, many patents that I obtained covered cool ideas, but were nonetheless effectively worthless to serve the client's business needs.

Continue reading Confessions of a "Recovering Patent Attorney" and Why I Have Joined the Growing Ranks of IP Strategists on Jackie Hutter's IP Asset Maximizer Blog.

• Dennis Crouch @patentlyo and Patently-O
• Stephen Albainy-Jenei @patentbaristas and Patent Baristas
• J. Matthew Buchanan @matt_buchanan and Promote the Progress
• Douglas Sorrocco @douglassorocco and PHOSITA
• Stephen M. Nipper @nipper and The Invent Blog
• R. David Donoghue @rdd and Chicago IP Litigation Blog
• Victoria Pynchon @vpynchon and IP ADR Blog
• Scott R. Cleere @secleere and Wisconsin Lawyers Blog
• Michael Scott @LawProf and Singularity Law
• Brett Trout @BrettTrout and BlawgIT
• Patrick Reilly @ipsociety and The Intellectual Property Society
• Latoicha Givens @iplaw101 and IP Law 101
• Ron Coleman @RonColeman and Likelihood of Confusion
• Colin Samuels @colinsamuels and Infamy or Praise
• Kevin Heller @kevinhell and Tech Law Advisor
• Tom Petrocelli @tompetrocelli and Tom's Technology Take
• Rex Gradeless @Rex7 and Social Media Law Student
• Ryan Roberts @startuplawyer and The Startup Lawyer
• B.Nidever, UCLA Office of IP, @bnidever and ArtInScience Cafe
• Jeffrey Hayzlett, Kodak Chief Business Development Officer @JeffreyHayzlett
  
• Bill Pollak, CEO of Incisive Media, @wpollak
• Kevin O'Keefe, CEO of LexBlog, @kevinokeefe and Real Lawyers Have Blogs
• Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures and founder of Alltop.com,  @guykawasaki

We'd like to welcome these followers to this little corner of the blogosphere, IP.com's  corporate weblog, Securing Innovation.

If you're on Twitter and you'd like to join those who are already following IP.com, turn your dial to @ipdotcom and click on the "Follow" button and see our growing number of followers there. If you're not yet on Twitter, join in and see what's going on.

We'll be updating this post, from time to time, so check back and see who else is among our followers on Twitter. And we'll be checking to see who's following our followers, and adding some of them to those we follow on Twitter, too. Yeah, it's a fun way to network among the leaders in the intellectual property community.

Kodak's Chief Business Development Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett, who's on Twitter @JeffreyHayzlett, shakes his head and wonders what vendors are thinking when they send him photo holiday cards NOT printed by Kodak. Makes you wonder.

Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog, whose company works with IP.com in the design and development of our company weblog, Securing Innovation, has shown us how to incorporate new social media like Twitter into the company's digital communications.

Tonight, following Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter, we see him pointing to an interesting article in U.S. News and World Report about how companies use social media to be a part of the conversation.

The onslaught of blogs, discussion forums and user-generated media has changed the flow of information about people, products and brands forever. Anyone with a computer, a video camera or even a cell phone can post information, reviews and comments about you and your brand on dozens of highly visited online destinations.

It's no longer enough to create a website and assume that prospects will learn about your company solely from there. In today's online social media world, businesses of all shapes and sizes must actively participate in online reputation management.

Of course, the best way to manage your online reputation from a business standpoint is to put out great products, provide excellent customer service and honor all your commitments. That's certainly a great start, but you may still need to monitor and respond to what's being said about your organization.

In the end, writes John Jantsch, the only way to control what people say about your company is to be part of the conversation. We might add, even when the conversation isn't about your company but about another company with a very similar name.

Click on the image above for a gift idea for women patent attorneys.

@ipdotcom recommends following @patentbaristas on Twitter.

Johnson Kong, Executive Vice President and Head of Asia Pacific for IP.com, is in Korea with Tom Colson, our CEO, who addressed an international group of thought leaders gathering at PATINEX 2008.

IP.com CEO Tom Colson's presentation was on Advanced Enterprise Management and IP Strategies.

The keynote address for PATINEX 2008 was by KAIST President Nam-Pyo Suh, who spoke on the Strategy of Patent Information Usage for Finding a New Market.

After this conference, Johnson Kong and Tom Colson are continuing on to Beijing and other centers in Asia that are regular stops for executives from IP.com.

Readers can follow at @ipdotcom on Twitter, where we're following other leaders in the technology space, like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Here's how Jonathan Schwartz explains how Twitter helps him run Sun:

"Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it's via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose."

We're working on it, but it's still early days in the integration of Twitter feeds into this blog. However, if you add @ipdotcom to those you're following on Twitter now, you'll be sure to hear more about the latest innovations in intellectual property management and IP strategies. We look forward to reading your "tweets" and following you, too, just like we're following Jonathan Schwartz and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.