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.

At an event in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, a representative of the Obama administration went before a gathering of Silicon Valley cleantech entrepreneurs to spread the good news about what's resulted from the stimulus package, and to get their feedback.

Peter Roehrig, a political appointee in the Department of Energy's office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, pointed to numbers released by the Congressional Budget Office that day suggesting that stimulus funding led to as many as 2.1 million jobs by the end of last year. The Department of Energy administrates $36.7 billion of the stimulus funds. Part of this, Roehrig noted, is going to a program to encourage energy-efficient retrofits for cities--a program being dubbed "cash for caulkers."

But the crowd at the "Meet the DOE" event at Nixon Peabody LLP on Tuesday didn't seem to agree that things were going so well, and used the Q&A session to vent their frustration about the lack of funding for energy startups. Several people asked why big, well-capitalized companies like DuPont and GM recieved funds while their start-ups can't get off the ground. Others noted that stimulus funding seemed to favor big companies, while on the other end the ARPA-E program favors very promising but less proven innovations; companies somewhere in the middle don't know where to turn. One man, representing a company developing an add-on for engines to make them fuel flexible, stood up with excitement as he told Roehrig that Washington needs to figure out a way to take better advantage of the intellectual capital concentrated in the Bay Area.

Roehrig, left to answer for the US government, took the criticism in his stride and deflected suggestions that all it takes is a grant writer and a lobbyist to win funding. Money for new energy technologies was indeed built into the stimulus package, he said, but all with the end of guaranteeing jobs--and bigger companies can make a better argument that they'll create jobs. Roehrig encouraged the companies to come to Washington to meet with DOE representatives personally, but no one seemed much comforted when he expressed that to help solve these problems, like everyone else in the room, he's hoping the economy improves.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has awarded $3 million in funding to start-up Amprius, which is developing silicon-nanowire battery anodes. The Menlo Park, CA company, spun out of Stanford University, will use the money to develop manufacturing processes. We've covered the Stanford research on silicon battery materials, and in November we wrote about the company's launch. Here's some more on the technology from that story:

Amprius' lithium-ion anodes are made of silicon nanowires, which can store 10 times more charge than graphite, the material used for today's lithium-ion battery anodes. According to the company, electric vehicles that run 200 miles between charges could go 380 miles on its batteries, and laptops that have four hours of run time could last for seven hours between charges.

[...]

When lithium-ion batteries are charged, lithium ions move from the cathode to the anode, while electrons flow in through an external electrical circuit; the process is reversed during discharge. Silicon has shown promise as an anode material because it can take up much more lithium than the carbon materials now used. Indeed, the theoretical maximum energy density of silicon is 10 times greater than carbon's. But silicon is fragile and tends to swell and crack after just one charge cycle.

However, battery anodes made from silicon nanowires can be cycled over and over again without damage. This fall, Yi Cui, Amprius founder and assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, demonstrated nanostructured silicon anodes that meet silicon's theoretical charge storage capacity without breaking. Mats of long, thin nanowires are pliable, which relieves the strain when the battery is charged and discharged. And collections of nanowires have a very high surface area, which means more sites for interacting with lithium.