Dubbed Blog Muse, the tool essentially creates a loop connecting readers and posters:
The interaction cycle we envisioned, shown below, is that readers would share with bloggers topics they were interested in reading about. Our tool would then forward these requests to potential bloggers, and if any of these bloggers then wrote about the topic we would then notify the requesters. We also allowed users to vote on others' topics in order to gather large audiences together, all of whom wanted to read about the same thing, as we thought this would be an even greater incentive for bloggers to write about a given topic.
It was interesting that while a test of the trial indicated user engagement rose, writer engagement didn't seem to rise also. As someone who's hit the writer's block wall numerous times, I have a gut instinct that being given a list of topics is only the first step. One still needs to have something to say about them, and that's where the real blockage occurs.
Nevertheless, the researchers seem to have added evidence that it helps to know what your readers are itching to hear, so you have a better chance of scratching it.
