On 1/30/07, Eric Hestenes <erichestenes at vikiwi.com> wrote: > Luis, > > Thanks again for all your thoughtful feedback. My pleasure; I'd really like to see this succeed- it is clearly needed. Tangent: everyone here should have seen the bluej/microsoft thing that went on over the weekend; if not, best summary I can find is here: http://271patent.blogspot.com/2007/01/ad-hoc-community-patent-review-and.html A good question to ask might be- what role would p2patent have played had it been up and running before this started? I'm really not sure if it is a great question (given the speed with which that particular meme moved) but something to ponder, at any rate. > Here are some followup > comments. > > > I have no idea about Topaz in particular, but I'd question why HA is a > > project requirement at this point in time. The costs far outweigh the > > benefits for a site that will inevitably be small at first. I can't > > suggest reading... > > Fair point. Another consideration is the ability for various participants > such as data center staff to understand the solution well enough to support > it. It is hard to support something when you're not really up to speed on > it, and we need to learn more at this point. Both data center and future generations of coders. The more standards-based your backend is, the better off everyone is. (I'm sure this is old news to Eric, but for those reading along, I strongly suggest http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/11/17/biggest-community-wins/ which talks about how having bigger adoption/bigger community is a bonus in all sorts of ways.) > > * what is the 'timeline' bar in p. 1 of the screen design pdf? Is that > > how far along in the process the given patent is? > > This represents the amount of remaining time left for community input on > this patent application. Sounds like that wasn't crystal clear in the > design, so maybe we need to improve that graphic or the wording. Ah. Maybe 'time remaining', and have it right to left, instead of left to right, such that shorter bars (perhaps with a color change as well?) indicate shorter time remaining? (If I understand correctly, the current mockups suggest that longer bar means further along in the process, means less time remaing.) > > * I might suggest calling 'tags' 'labels' instead (as google often > > does); tags are such a technorati term, and I sense this is reaching > > out to a broader audience. > > I agree that "tags" is overloaded, but "labels" also seems cryptic. Maybe we > can use some English here. Open to suggestions. We actually have several > different uses for tag-style input, so this is a good one to get right. E.g. > "List keywords for Application" and "List keywords for Prior Art", or > something similar. I'm afraid I have no great advice here- all the options are suboptimal in some way or another. Would seem to be a great candidate for user testing if IBM's usability people have some cycles to spare. > > An obvious 'mashup' might be with Google's patent search and/or the > > PTO's own search; a greasemonkey script of some sort that displays > > very basic peer2patent information (the sparklines, maybe?) when > > browsing 3rd-party patent search engines would be great to have. Could > > be a very simple API- provide patent number, get back fragment of XML > > with links + sparklines images. > > Can you clarify how this mashup would work? What data is being passed > around? I guess I'm envisioning this as less mashup and more plugin? Basic idea is that if I were browsing a patent somewhere else, a greasemonkey script, firefox plugin, etc., could grab the patent application number, ask p2patent for information, and display somewhere on the page a small box showing the status of the application at p2patent. Sorry if I'm not making it clear; it is a pretty half-baked idea ;) > Google has issued patents and does not have patent applications (so far), so > they will not have one of our apps displayed in their world. On the other > hand, we will have references to issued patents, which are on google and > other web site. ah, right, forgot they don't have applications. > What I thought might make sense was a way to mark an issued patent inside a > 3rd party app like a bookmark, and then import it for use as prior art, > giving credit back to the 3rd party source. Sounds like a great idea. Need not even be a patent, no? i.e., in the BlueJ/Microsoft case, I'd want to find a description of BlueJ's functionality and then somehow shoot that into p2patent. You might want to look at Zotero or Stylefeeder's javascript [ http://www.stylefeeder.com/bookmark-options.html ] - two very different approaches for capturing data out of a page and storing it elsewhere. Again, hope this is useful- Luis
