Writer's block is the bane of bloggers, that stuck feeling that you don't have the inspiration needed to write a good post.  It's something that our team has been aware of, and we've worked hard to come up with ways to deal with the problem.

In the release of Compendium Blogware that went live on Tuesday morning of this week, we introduced some new features to the User Dashboard page where bloggers create and edit posts.

For some time, the dashboard page has provided a keyword blog title tag cloud. where the titles were sized based on the number of posts in each keyword blog.  At a glance, bloggers could get an idea of what has been written about most within their organization's blogs

We decided to make the folowing improvements and additions:
  1. Each customer gets the ability to choose up to five keyword blogs, which serve as primary focus concepts for their blogging employees.
  2. The old tag cloud was replaced with a smaller panel that shows the chosen focus keywords.  The user can still see the larger cloud by clicking on a link.
  3. Blogging users are presented with a list of links to recent articles that were found by queries against against search services that index timely content.  The queries are based on the list of focus keywords.
The rationale for this is simple.  Much of the posting activity in the blogosphere involves writing about news stories or others' reactions to a news story.  By fetching items related to the focus keywords, our application helps bloggers keep in tune with what's going on with things related to their line of work.