“I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

Within a New York Times article titled Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter is a suggestion of a decline in blogging.

One has the text:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

BUT

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

AND an anecdote

Russ Steele, 72, a retired Air Force officer and aerospace worker from Nevada City, Calif., says he spends up to three hours a day seeking interesting topics and writing about them for his blog, NC Media Watch, which covers local issues in Nevada County, northeast of Sacramento. All he wants is to have a voice in the community for his conservative views.

Although he signed up for Facebook this month, Mr. Steele said he did not foresee using it much and said that he remained committed to blogging. “I’d rather spend my time writing up a blog analysis than a whole bunch of short paragraphs and then send them to people,” he said. “I don’t need to tell people I’m going to the grocery store.”

Meanwhile, at patenthawk.com/blog, on 17 Feb 2011:

This blog provides an educational service, a ready case law reference, and sharp commentary on patent events that simply don't appear elsewhere, all the while striving to make a bit of a hit by applying a bit of wit. It was never intended to be an open-ended forum for backbiting by anonymous kibbitzers. As Groucho Marx said, "those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others." Comments are no longer welcome here.

Fortunately, there aren't many comments here at IPBiz. Sadly, sites like the Stanford Daily and californiastemcellreport are a bit adverse to printing comments.

***Of a comment at Patently-O on 21 Feb 2011:

Babel Boy said...

Ned, I recall that Dennis had a post a while back in which he asked "Why do you use dependent claims?" or something of the sort. It struck me as one of those dumb questions that when you actually think about it, you don't have a good answer, which turns the dumb-pointing finger 180 degrees.

As I recall, there weren't a lot of good answers, certainly not from me, but it got me thinking, which is what these blogs are all about.

But let's do a hypothetical along your lines. I have sued you for infringing my claims 1 and 2. In litigation you produce prior art that knocks out my independent Claim 1 as obvious. Claim 2 is narrower, of course, but it adds nothing that is non-obvious over Claim 1. It was allowed only because it was the child of what was originally deemed non-obvious Claim 1.

So how does falling back on the obvious narrower claim help if the parent turns out to be obvious? If the child claim does not contribute something non-obvious over the parent claim, then merely being narrower is not gonna' save my bacon as a fall-back position.

IPBiz notes that if one merely adds, in the dependent claim, a claim element that was known at the time of filing and that element functions in a predictable way, such an addition is not very useful if the independent claim is found invalid. But if the known element does not function in a predictable way in the combination, then the dependent claim is useful.