Friday, January 13, 2006
USPTO Patent Application Process Optimization A Hilltop Algorithm
So we all know the USPTO (United States Patent Office) is struggling to keep up with the demand from new patent applications. USPTO officials say they're sitting on a 2 year backlog friends of mine that have been awarded patents (with the full certificate and seal of the USPTO on them) say the process takes more like 5 years from start to finish. Faced with that and the ever-increasing number of patents being filed every year and the fact that patent filing is only going to increase, the USPTO has decided to take a couple of ideas from corporate america and use meta tagging and social networking to speed things up. The MIT Technology Review story says...“Faced with this overload, the USPTO announced this week that it's exploring forward-looking partnerships with technology companies, such as IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and Google, to create three evaluation systems, being worked on concurrently, to both increase the quality of software patents and shorten the time it takes the office to either issue or decline a patent.
One project would create a centralized, searchable repository of all open-source code and related documentation in existence. The second would create an indexing system to rank the viability of patent applications. The third would tap into the greater community's intelligence when reviewing patent applications (something organizations such as Wikipedia have done for years, albeit toward a different goal)...�
The story goes on to say...
“All three of three projects would take advantage of a couple of the most engaging trends on the Web right now: metatagging and social networking Metatagging allows individuals to add descriptive terms to online elements, such as photos or files, which make the files easier to find by others. Social networking sites such as Flickr and Delicious have built businesses, in part, around tagging and make it easy for people to share their expertise and opinions among designated "friend" groups or the community at large.�
Quite honestly, taking the input of big businss (Yes Google, you are Corporate America/Big Business now) will definitely speed up the process because the partners of the USPTO are some of the heaviest filers of patents in the world and they want their patents approved more quickly so they can secure a competitive advantage in their respective industries. However, using social networking will put these same USPTO partners at the top of the social hill and if you're not looked upon favorably by them (you get no link love) then your application is moved to the bottom of the hill. Just like good ole search engine optimization, you gotta get link love from the best sites in your industry if you want to succeed (unless you're just optimizing for MSN search, sorry guys). Otherwise your pages only show up in ghetto search. I guess one could conclude that a bootstrapper with no connections would end up in the GhettoPatent pile.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 10:18 AM
Permanent Link: USPTO Patent Application Process Optimization A Hilltop Algorithm
| Comments (0)
Subscribe to The MarketingShift Feed