Saturday 2 November 2013

A Polleriori


I wanted to thank all of you who have taken part in the recent poll concerning the professional profile of the readers of this blog.

240 persons have participated this time, which is less than in May 2012, where I had almost 300 answers. This notwithstanding, I do not have the impression that the number of readers has diminished; the number of pageviews (whatever that is) is still increasing. I would estimate that the blog has about 300 regular readers, which is quite considerable for such a niche site (NB: not to be confounded with nice shite). There are almost 500 e-mail subscribers, but I would not be surprised if quite a few of them did not actually read what they receive.

Here is the outcome of the poll, together with the results of the 2012 poll:


as well as a (condensed) pie chart:


The overall situation is similar to what we had in 2012. Private practice, industry and the EPO have slightly increased their share. The most noteworthy difference appears to be the fact that there are less trainees on the blog. Is this because the EQE has higher pass rates now and the number of trainees decreases? Anyway, I always tell trainees that they should study the law rather than case law niceties, the knowledge of which will not help them in the exam.

I have recently met several colleagues who told me they were readers of the blog. A few of them made me understand that there were too many posts. I have, therefore, launched another poll in order to know what the general feeling is. Please let me know how many posts you would like to have every week. Thanks.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This made me laugh more than anything I have read all year:

"which is quite considerable for such a niche site (NB: not to be confounded with nice shite)"

I am one of the email subscribers who did not complete your poll. Sorry about that, but I must have just missed the poll for some reason.

I think your shite is great. Keep up the excellent work Oliver.

Anonymous said...

Re: "Anyway, I always tell trainees that they should study the law rather than case law niceties, the knowledge of which will not help them in the exam."

Well. According to the presented statistics, this advice has been given to 33 trainees. For 2 of them the advice was helpful.

ExaMinus said...

I answered your first poll. I will not answer the next one because there is no suitable option.

Considering the time you should spend reading, selecting and translating case law, not to mention picking a nice picture to go along with it, the only decent answer is that you should post as many times per week as you are comfortable with. If you want to decrease, that's fine. If you want to keep the non-case law posts on week ends, that's fine. If you want to move these non-case law posts on week days instead of the "regular" case law post, that's equally fine. In such matter, any decision is good, there can be no procedural violation and no appeal is allowed.

oliver said...

Thanks, ExaMinus. I am comfortable with whatever the outcome is. The idea behind the poll is that I would rather not prepare five posts per week if my readers actually do not want so much. Qui peut le plus peut le moins, as they say in France, so it would not be a problem for me to reduce the number of posts.

I have an easy solution for those who prefer 0 posts per week. Please contact me for more details. :-)

Anonymous said...

If I may suggest: why don't you post shorter articles? More synthetic? (qui peut le plus peut le moins)

This black background with this bright colored characters... This hurts my poor old little eyes and my poor old little head. Olala

oliver said...

Yes, I know, the black background is not unproblematic. I do not know for how long I will continue this work, but as long as I do, I think I will stick to the design. Perhaps one day somebody else will take over, which might be an opportunity for design changes. For the time being, you might use the e-mail subscription option, which delivers text on a white background, which might better suit your eyes.

Regarding the (excessive) length of the posts, it was always my idea to make people read (parts of) the decision rather than summarising it. Those who want good summaries and who are capable of reading French should adopt the excellent Blog du Droit Européen des Brevets.