Lessons learned from blog muse: Audience-based inspiration for bloggers

Abstract

Blogging in the enterprise is increasingly popular and recent research has shown that there are numerous benefits for both individuals and the organization, e.g. developing reputation or sharing knowledge. However, participation is very low, blogs are often abandoned and few users realize those benefits. We have designed and implemented a novel system - called Blog Muse - whose goal is to inspire potential blog writers by connecting them with their audience through a topic-suggestion system. We describe our system design and report results from a 4-week study with 1004 users who installed our tool. Our data indicate that topics requested by users are effective at inspiring bloggers to write and lead to more social interactions around the resulting entries. © 2010 ACM.