When did social media or online social networking start? Was it a few years ago off the back of MySpace, Facebook and Web 2.0?

No. It was thriving in San Francisco and the Bay Area before Mark Zuckerberg, twenty-something CEO and founder of Facebook, was born.

What is the secret of enduring greatness for a company? Jim Collins has an answer.

Collins is a prominent writer on business management and author of business books which are among the all time best sellers. He wrote Good to Great and co-authored Built to Last. An excellent overview of Good to Great is the one here by Jim Belshaw. 

In his recent article in Fortune magazine, The secret of enduring greatness, Collins revisits his familiar theme of business survival and endurance. His data includes who's in and out of the Fortune 500 list.

And this is what he concludes is the secret of enduring greatness for a company: "Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, whether you make it onto the Fortune 500, and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you."

Fashion, industrialisation and entrepreneurship are forever linked.

Something old. The word "entrepreneur" was made fashionable by someone who grew rich as a cotton factory entrepreneur. The French economic theorist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), is credited as the first in continental Europe to write about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. He was inspired by Adam Smith.

QUESTION: What are the most effective strategies for commercialisation of a company's ideas, products, R&D and intellectual property? 

ANSWER: "It is the approach that best suits - and is most closely aligned with - the company's overall corporate strategy and the competitive environment in which the company operates."

A mantra for our business environment emphasising innovation and collaboration could be: "Collaborate to survive and invent."

Collaboration is as old as the first invention. Bill Bryson's remarkable book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, tells us in his 29th chapter about teardrop-shaped stone hand-axes.

These axes first appeared about a million and a half years ago and are certainly the most common technology for the vast majority of human history. They have come to be known as Acheulean tools.

I have a favourite question in conversations with start-ups and new clients. It is a question which leads to discussions about the client's business or commercial situation. 

It's a question designed to shed light on the client's business model, industry economics and facts relevant to providing a better legal solution.

We all know that owning, controlling and trading in intellectual property (IP) can create wealth. Losing ownership and control, or not trading IP, can lose wealth.

Industry case studies bring these truths to life. One for the music industry was in BusinessWeek last week. It reports US census data showing one in four U.S. record stores around in 2002 was gone by 2005, a net loss of 1,900 stores. It points at digital retailer, iTunes, which boasts 6 million songs.

Personal case studies make the truths register. We did it in Music Business Entrepreneurship: Eulogy for James Brown. We do it now for Brown's predecessor, and fellow Georgian, Ray Charles (1930-2004).

We welcome and make no charge for conversations with new clients about how we might help with their intellectual property. To get you into the groove to call, here are some thoughts on creativity, invention and innovation. We are tracking with Australia's 2020 Summit.

All human beings have a creative urge. Mine for some months has been to write about the following four minute home video on YouTube. It's the Fountains of the Bellagio Hotel in Los Vegas. The music is Dawn, Ayeshe's Dance, a piece in the Gayane ballet by Aram Khachaturian. Observe the fountain's interplay with the music and then read on.

Speaking in workshops and seminars I've often posed a puzzle to wake up the audience. I've asked: "What is the most powerful thing in the cave of a cave man when he skins a freshly killed beast using a stone tool?"

Most guess that the most powerful thing must be the stone tool. Few point to the one thing that helps the cave man know where to hunt, what to hunt, how to skin and how to fashion tools to help in all aspects of survival.

That most powerful thing is the cave man's brain.

In disputes between clients and their consultants two questions often arise.

They are whether money is outstanding and who owns the intellectual property in completed and delivered work. The short answer for both questions is, it depends... and a lot on what is in writing.

In the eyes of the law, employees and contractors are as different as apples and oranges. Hence numerous legal issues turn on whether a person is another's employee or, alternatively, an independent contractor.

The distinction is critical for ownership and protection of copyright and other intellectual property. It is also vital for legal compliance considerations under workers compensation, superannuation, insurance, taxation and other legislation.

A good contract prepared by a competent business lawyer will help remove legal doubts. However, take care. Consider the bias of the person preparing the contract. "Creative lawyering" involves genetic engineering ("GM") to modify the distinction between employee apples and independent contractor oranges. What you see in some contracts is not necessarily what you get.

The rise in keyword advertising has brought with it opportunity for some and piracy, theft or misleading conduct for others. Telstra yesterday admitted it fell into the later camp in 2005 in its use of keyword advertising.

A court case report in today's Australian, indicates that "Telstra announced yesterday that its classifieds division, the Trading Post contravened sections 52 and 53(d) of the Trade Practices Act through its search engine marketing on google.com.au in August 2005."

What use do 58,480 teenagers aged 12 to 18 make of their mobile phones in 31 countries? A major survey indicates a lot has changed in 18 months. It is immediately relevant to the IP commercialisation strategy of many businesses trading in intellectual property .

The teenagers were surveyed in October and November 2007 by Habbo, part of Sulake, an online entertainment and social networking company in Finland. Habbo states that statistical weighting was employed to give all participating countries an equal weight in the global results. Habbo's virtual world website claims 8.6 million unique users on a monthly basis.

Gathered below are statistics from the survey released in April 2008. It follows Habbo's first survey in 2006. A lot has changed in 18 months.

While a .com.au domain name may be transferred, it cannot be sold given licensing arrangements, for example with IT Melbourne which issues them.

The position is different for .com names. Year on year record prices are being achieved for .com names. That's great news for a few, but for millions of others a reminder is needed that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

" I viddied right at once what to do " says Alex in the 1962 book and 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Viddied is Alex's lingo for viewed, saw or realised. I had Alex's sensation this evening as I viddied a superb slide presentation titled "Web 2.0 goes social" credited to Jia Lynn Yang of Fortune magazine.

At once I viddied how it provides insights on conducting smart patent search work. This is a very real issue, including for inventors of software patents and business method patents.

Earlier today I had a phone conversation with an inventor client about how he might go about commissioning a patent search. His invention will be initially rendered in software and later as a hardware product. As an analogy, imagine if Apple first launched with iTunes, and followed up with the iPod and iTunes pre-loaded Apple computers.

Advising an inexperienced client about IP search work takes time. The conversation turned to how to gain from patent protection and avoid patent threats.

Every business has a brand, some have several. All businesses need customers for their brands because the dominant purpose of business is to make money. To reach those customers they need exposure. Simple really... except things constantly change.

Take the business of Unilever Australia Limited as an example. In Australia it owns or conducts brand management for such trade marks as Rexona, Surf, Sunsilk, Vaseline, Streets, Omo, Lipton, Flora, and Bertolli.

Today I want to join the dots between a few posts last week. I also want to put out a theory which may, at least partly, explain why social media sites are hits especially with teenagers. They include sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Bepo. More broadly one can add other social media sites which include social networking features, eg LinkedIn, Delicious, Flikr, and YouTube.

Among the key features of these social media sites, often listed as part of Web 2.0, are their scope for comments; ease of content uploading, tagging and bookmarking; linking to "friends"; and receiving automated updates about them.

What does it take today to create or improve your corporate or business digital footprint? Is reaching business elites part of your target?

As a solicitor working with content for 25 years and with digital media  since 1983 I've learned a thing or two about digital media law as well as creative and commercial considerations. The question is: what works today for business? If you are pressured for time then make this sentence your mantra: The digital media footprint and functionality a business or corporation needs requires ideas and a plan. Following are free ideas, call and we can discuss a plan.

The habits of teenagers often stay with them for life. Music was one of my addictions as a teenager. It inspired me to write Music formats and law: commercialisation of 45-rpm records.

A recently released Australian Government survey contains good statistics on the habits of young people today and their use of digital media. It is relevant for developers, distributors and financiers of intellectual property (IP) products for teenagers and young adults. It is useful for commercialisation or IP valuation of a social media website, educational site, online game, software program, or other IT product.

When I go to a party alone and the host finds out I'm a lawyer I often hear: "Oh, so and so over there is a lawyer, let me introduce you to her." My fantasy is to reply with this: "Thank you. But is there an engineer in the house? You see, the work of engineers inspires me."

Engineers create intellectual property (IP). Sadly the kudos, social status and money too often go to others, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries. We are pondering this theme as Australia's 2020 ideas summit approaches - http://www.australia2020.gov.au. We seek an escalator to the future, better still a road and a road map.

Engineers can build IP roads and road maps to the future. They deal with substantive IP. Their work can invent or create a market. 

In contrast most people in business, including often we IP lawyers, work with merely late stage representational IP. We merely paste IP law decoration or packaging onto products or services, eg by making a brand a registered trade mark. This rarely creates new markets. It's not blue ocean strategy.

Making money from R&D and intellectual property is based on documents.

I learned this in 1983 on the first day of my first job as Legal Officer for Angus & Robertson Publishers, Australia's oldest book publisher.

A colleague pointed to three tall and very heavy fire-proof filing cabinets in a hallway. She then said: "The publishing contracts with authors in there are the foundation for the wealth of this company over the last 100 years."

This post ends with practical suggestions for improving record keeping. I'll first discuss why it is vital in business to make records (which here includes preparing documents).