"Everything, including touch, is best for something and worse for something else," says Ken Hinckley, a research scientist at Microsoft who is involved with the project, which will be presented this week at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Atlanta.

The prototype for Manual Deskterity is a drafting application built for the Microsoft Surface, a tabletop touchscreen. Users can perform typical touch actions, such as zooming in and out and manipulating images, but they can also use a pen to draw or annotate those images.

The interface's most interesting features come out when the two types of interaction are combined. For example, a user can copy an object by holding it with one hand and then dragging the pen across the image, "peeling" off a new image that can be placed elsewhere on the screen. By combining pen and hand, users get access to features such as an exacto knife, a rubber stamp, and brush painting.

Hinckley says the researchers videotaped users working on visual projects with sketchbooks, scissors, glue, and other typical physical art supplies. They noticed that people tended to hold an image with one hand while making notes about it or doing other work related to it with the other. The researchers decided to incorporate this in their interface--touching an object onscreen with a free hand indicates that the actions performed with the pen relate to that object.

Hinckley acknowledges that the interface includes a lot of tricks that users need to learn. But he thinks this is true of most interfaces. "This idea that people just walk up with an expectation of how a [natural user interface] should work is a myth," he says.

Hinckley believes that natural user interfaces can ease the learning process by engaging muscle memory, rather than forcing users to memorizes sequences of commands or the layout of menus. If the work is successful, Hinckley says it will show how different sorts of input can be used in combination.

Hinckley also thinks it's a mistake to focus on devices that work with touch input alone. He says, "The question is not, 'How do I design for touch?' or 'How do I design for pen?' We should be asking, 'What is the correct division of labor in the interface for pen and touch interactions such that they complement one another?'"

The researchers plan to follow up by adapting their interface to work on mobile devices.

Blogging often sounds like a great idea: sharing thoughts and expertise, becoming a part of a community, and taking the first few steps to wider recognition as a writer. But many bloggers quickly get disillusioned.

IBM's internal records show, for example, that only three percent of the company's employees have posted to a blog at all. Of those who have, 80 percent have posted only five times or fewer. Many of the people interviewed for the study say they stopped blogging--or never got started--because they didn't think anyone would read their posts.

In an effort to fix this problem, IBM researchers have been experimenting with a tool called Blog Muse, which suggests a topic for a blog post with a ready-made audience.

"We saw this disconnect between readers and writers," says Werner Geyer, a researcher at IBM's center for social software in Cambridge who was involved with the work. The writers surveyed often weren't sure how to interest readers, and many of their posts got little to no response. Readers, on the other hand, couldn't find blogs on the topics they wanted to read about.

So Geyer and his colleagues built a widget to bring these two halves of the problem closer together. Readers use the widget to suggest topics they want to read about, and they can vote in support of existing suggestions. Those suggestions then get sent to possible writers, matching topics to writers by analyzing his social network connections and areas of expertise.

The researchers found that writers were most likely to post on a topic suggested by a sizeable audience, and that audience members followed up by read posts on requested topics. Blog posts resulting from the system also received about twice as many comments, three times as many ratings, and much more traffic, says Casey Dugan, another researcher at IBM's Cambridge center.

The effort didn't substantially increase the quantity of posts however. The researchers speculate that this is because users who planned to write blog posts anyway simply chose suggested topics rather than coming up with their own.

The researchers want to do a larger, longer-term deployment of the original tool (their research was done over four weeks with 1,000 users). And they plan to present their results in April at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, GA.