Readers of this weblog may by now know that it is an experiment. The idea was to show how a weblog could bring fresh and interesting information about trade mark law and practice in Europe to a large and varied readership, even without a formal launch and widescale publicity. The name "Class 46" was chosen because, since there are only 45 Classes in the Nice Classification, no-one would find the weblog by accidentally searching "Class 46". The team of bloggers has also kept itself low-profile, so that anyone searching for its contributors would not be led to the weblog. The "hits" notched up so far are therefore the result of nothing more formal than viral marketing.

So far, results have been very promising. The week before last, Class 46 received 1,024 casual hits. With an email subscription list of more than 100 readers and a growing RSS feedership (whatever the RSS counter says, the official Feedburner figure is 78). In January Class 46 was visited by 3,170 web-users and this month -- despite the fact that it has two fewer days -- the figure looks like reaching 4,000.

We the contributors believe that Class 46 offers a really useful service to the trade mark community in Europe and beyond. We are, in alphabetical order, Birgit Clark (Boult Wade Tennant), Frédéric Glaize (Plasseraud), Julia Holden (Trevisan & Cuonzo), Ignacio Marqués (Baker & McKenzie), Jeremy Phillips, Tomasz Rychlicki (Patpol) and Gino van Roeyen (Banning).