Creating and Strengthening Connections among Employees with a Blog Service

Recently companies provide social network services (SNS) for their employees for purposes of sharing knowledge and creating/strengthening connections among the employees. We investigated Hewlett-Packard Japanpsilas SNS for its employees and found that communications in the SNSpsilas blog service was not active enough. We considered that one of its major reasons as hesitation in communicating with strangers, and mediators (e.g. common friends) can lower the hesitation. Based on the idea, we propose a system that prompts users to communicate with others in the blogosphere by recommending appropriate blog articles to attach comments. The system recommends articles based on userpsilas interests and human connections among users; i.e., it recommends interesting articles for a user when mediators exist between the user and authors of the articles or comments for them.