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.

Everyone knows that online conversations happen fast, but Ilya Grigorik, CTO and founder of PostRank, a company that tracks online conversations around pieces of content, shared some interesting concrete numbers this afternoon at Defrag 2009, a technology conference taking place in Denver. Grigorik randomly selected 100,000 posts that the company had tracked and calculated when conversation happened around them.

It's no surprise that 80 percent of engagement around a post happens on day one, and that 60 percent of that happens within the first hour. What was surprising, however, is that this is actually a decrease from the numbers Grigorik has for 2007. According to his data from two years ago, 95 percent of engagement happened on the first day, and 90 percent of that was within the first hour.

These numbers seem strange considering that the Web appears to be operating at a faster pace. Grigorik's numbers show, for example, that about on average 66 percent of the conversation around a post happens on "chatter" channels such as Twitter, which is nearly the opposite of the trend two years ago, when most conversation happened on the site where a post was published.

Grigorik said he thinks the explanation lies in the effect of the strength of weak ties. He believes that online conversation has become so distributed that it takes time for information to filter out to every social group that's going to talk about it. If he's right, it's a ray of hope for the real-time Web.

On the surface, it might appear that more real-time streams will lead to a stream of data that appears and disappears, leaving no time to ponder the meaning of any of it. If Grigorik is right, however, real-time streams and the social infrastructure around them may help information find its way to more people who would be interested in discussing it.

Technology Review is hosting its seventh annual Emerging Technologies Conference, EmTech⁰⁷, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. The conference kicked off Tuesday, September 25, 2007 and will run until September 27, exploring next-generation technologies and their impact on business and society. An agenda of the event is posted on our site, as is live video coverage of every EmTech session.

There will also be numerous professional bloggers covering the event. Listed below are links to blogs where conference news has been posted so far.

Owen Wilson, Valleywag
Recent posts: "Why Brazil's not buying Negroponte's laptops", "Sky Dayton just wants to be your friend", "Kevin Rose says Digg to launch headline suggestions"

Sara Tomlin, Nature Newsblog
Recent posts: "Emerging Tech: not yet diggin it?" and "Emerging Tech: amazing grace"

Martin LaMonica, Cnet News Blog
Recent posts: "Brazil's minister of culture calls for free digital society", "Simonyi tells programmers to leave the Dark Ages", "Social-media pros: we're just getting started"

Dan Farber, ZDNet
Recent post: "In search of intentional software"

Wade Roush, Travels with Rhody
Recent post: "Second Earth at EmTech 07"

Andy Plesser, Beet.TV
Recent post: "Charles Simonyi, Microsoft Former Chief Architect, Spaceman, Sees the Future of Software Development"

Caleb Booker, Metaversed
Recent post: "EmTech's Second Earth Panel Hints at 3D Future"

Jason Dowdell, Marketing Shift
Recent post: "MIT Emerging Technology Conference Day 1"

Other conference news items:

Matt Hines, InfoWorld
Article: "Tech giants chart research goals"

Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek
Article: "Big Ideas Aim To Make Tech Easier, But Also Eat Lots of Bandwidth"

Lucas Mearian, Computerworld
Article: "U.S. faces competitive disadvantage from lack of women in tech jobs"

As the conference proceeds, we will continue to post links to blogs and news items from around the Web.