I reviewed some of the course offerings on EdX last night and came across a Text Mining and Analytics professional education course that featured patent mining as an application.

I don't know much about patent mining so I watched the Sneak Peak video for the course to learn more:

The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) website is located at http://www.uspto.gov and contains a wealth of useful information and functionality. The USPTO is in a partnership with Google to host free patent products which you can access here:

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents.html

There is alot of data here but they do break down the data into smaller compressed XML datasets with file names that use the date of publication. So you can download the latest dataset, use some XML tools to extract the content, and then do some patent mining magic on the data. The XML datasets do not provide up-to-the-minute reporting of patent applications so you would need to research the set of USPTO query strings that you can use to get various types of data from them if you want to monitor for certain types of patenting activity on the site.

There are other patent databases you can parse and monitor but the USPTO is probably the best place to focus limited patent mining resources on, at least initially. I'm not a patent mining expert, however, so if this type of stuff intrigues you then you can enroll in mentioned course to learn more.

If you want to get familiar with the content of USPTO patents an excellent place to start is to check out the current week for the Official Gazette which announces all new USPTO patents issued in the last week. Lots of interesting new technologies are described in detail if you want to read about them.