Later today my patent wishes for the New Year will be posted, which I realize are a little late, but I decided to take some time off over the holidays, visit family, have family visit and enjoy as much pro and college football as possible!  Before I turn the page on 2009 and look head to 2010, I wanted to take a look back on the year.  This has been a good year for IPWatchdog.com.  We were recognized at one of the top 100 websites for lawyers by the American Bar Association and I received press credentials from the US Supreme Court to report on Bilski (see #11 below), which were but two developments during 2009. and I want to thank the many contributors and readers who continue to visit us and read our news articles, thoughts and opinions.  We look forward to many wonderful things in 2010!

I am happy to report that during 2009 we had our biggest year ever in terms of traffic to IPWatchdog.com. Our top 8 articles each received over 10,000 page views, 18 articles received over 5,000 page views, 33 articles received over 4,000 page views, 62 articles received over 2,500 page views and a staggering 304 articles were viewed over 1,000 times during 2009.  Below are the top 25 for 2009, a couple of which first were written in 2008 and 2007, showing quite a bit of staying power and popularity.

Without further ado, here are the top 25:

1. Obama Wants Open Source IT Solutions for US (35,500 page views in 2009)
2. Red Bull Wins Trademark Lawsuit (19,618)
3. Jobs and Apple Seek Patent on Operating System Advertising (15,653)
4. Who Knew Avon Had Patents? (13,991)
5. Obscure Patent: Skateboard Deck (11,824)
6. Michael Jackson: Inventor of Anti-Gravity Illusion (11,600)
7. Famous Inventors: Benjamin Franklin (11,389)
8. Family Dog Cloned Thanks to Dolly Patents (10,783)
9. The Top 25 Patent Blogs (7,485)
10. Vote for the Top Patent Blogs (7,028)
11. Bilski Arguments Complete at the US Supreme Court (6,789)
12. The Making of a Good Patent Related Press Release (6,692)
13. PTO Hiring Freeze and Budget Problems (6,294)
14. Improvement Patents & Inventions (6,235)
15. Avoiding Invent Help & Other Invention Scams (5,485)
16. LegalZoom Continues Unauthorized Practice of Law (5,393)
17. US Supreme Court Grants Cert in Bilski (5,294)
18. Beware Invent Help Press Releases (5,002)
19. The Top 50 Patent Blogs (4,967)
20. Review: Blackberry Tour Not Ready for Prime Time (4,957)
21. Bill Gates Seeks Patent on Hurricane Prevention (4,816)
22. Michael Jackson and the Beatles Copyrights (4,662)
23. Report Compares Patent Assets of GM, Ford and Chrysler (4,466)
24. Open Source Race to Zero May Destroy Software Industry (4,403)
25. How to Patent Software in a Post Bilski Era (4,370)

We also had a very good year in terms of Unique Visitors and Total Number of Visits.  Had it not been for missing about 7 days worth of statistics in June due to a server error we would have likely come close to or just exceeded 700,000 unique visitors for 2009.

And our average visit length was 353 seconds.

While 71.77% of our traffic comes from the US, we had strong popularity around the world in 2009.

Thanks again for making 2009 a very memorable year.  We pledge to bring our “A” game in 2010!