Tripping over 100,000 views

IP Draughts loves data.  This website of London data, updated every 10 minutes, is wonderful, and IP Draughts has bookmarked it, although it is not immediately obvious what he will do with the information.  It is useful to know the height of the tide at Tower Bridge, but it is a few years since IP Draughts last canoed on the river in London.  He has a vivid recollection of that occasion, particularly of being overtaken under an arch of one of London’s bridges by the Merrie Thames, a tourist boat, while simultaneously coping with a fast-flowing tide, some large waves, and an inquisitive labrador standing up in the canoe.

Similarly, it is interesting to know how many Boris bikes are out on hire, and what the air quality is like in Bloomsbury, even if IP Draughts can’t think of an immediate, practical use for this information.

So, please indulge IP Draughts for reciting some data about this blog.  Our excuse is that we have recently received our 100,000th visit to the site.  If this site were a supermarket, we might have offered the 100,000th visitor the opportunity to fill a trolley with groceries, without charge.  But (to state the obvious) we’re not a supermarket, and we’re not that generous, and anyway we don’t know who the 100,000th visitor was.

According to WordPress’s records, we have received visits from people in approximately 200 countries (how many are there?).  We are currently running at between 200 and 250 visits on most weekdays.

There have been 268 postings, and 383 comments on the blog.  The posting on which most comments were received is When is a licence not a licence? When it’s a covenant not to sue.

The most popular pages on the blog since it was set up in 2011, other than the home page, have been:

Assignment and change of control: vital boilerplate clauses in IP agreements?		3,394
Postgraduate diploma in IP transactions – an update		2,813
Inappropriate use of indemnities		2,335
Shall or will in contracts?		2,218
10 words and phrases you should never use in IP contracts		1,982
Well stacked wedding cakes…		1,626
Top 10 howlers when preparing contracts for signature		1,494
Hold harmless revisited		1,465
Do you need a science degree to be a good IP lawyer?		1,185
Don’t sign a binding letter of intent!		1,148

Thank you to all our readers for your support.  Please let us know if there are topics on which you think we should post and which might help us to achieve 200,000 viewings.

Please vote for us in the ABA Blawg 100 contest

We are delighted to report that this blog has been selected by the American Bar Association for inclusion in the Blawg 100 for 2012.  This is the ABA’s annual listing of what it considers to be the best 100 legal blogs.  According to Twitter comment (we have not checked) we are the only blog outside North America to receive the accolade this year.

This year’s list includes some legal blogs that we admire and consult regularly, such as Ken Adam’s Koncision and the China Law Blog, led by Dan Harris, and others that we visit very occasionally, such as Bryan Garner’s Law Prose, and Dennis Crouch’s Patently O.  The blog that we consult on a daily basis, IPKat, led by Jeremy Phillips, was selected for the Blawg 100 in 2010 but not this year.

Honorees of the Blawg 100 are entered in a popularity contest, in which the ABA invites members of the public to vote for the blog that they like best.  Please consider registering to vote and voting for us here.  When voting, find us in the “legal research / writing” category.

To help you make up your minds, we include below some comments that others have made about this blog in the last few months.  We are grateful for all of these comments (no, really!)

IPKat is reported to have said that we are his favourite legal blog (other than his own), noting that we are “pedantic, smug, practical and generally right”.

voting for the blawg 100 begins…

Danish Member of the European Parliament, and member of the Pirate Party, Amelia Andersdotter, chided us in a comment on this blog for our “insanely fine-tuned nuance”.

Ken Adams of Koncision, when proposing our inclusion in the Blawg 100, noted that our “interesting and insightful” blog is leavened with “gently offbeat and self-deprecating humor”.

We are really thrilled (but not, we hope, insanely smug) about winning this award and hope it will help us raise the blog’s profile and increase our international readership.  Thank you to everyone who proposed us and to everyone who votes for us!