Linked Intelligence

Outgoing LinkedIn VP of Marketing Konstantin Guericke recently posted on MLPF and LinkedInnovators (and maybe somewhere else - sorry if I’m leaving anyone out) a wrap-up of what LinkedIn did in 2006. While they didn’t quite hit the 10 million mark they projected at the beginning of the year, they still impressively more than doubled [...]

Jason Calacanis (Weblogs, Inc. founder and now SVP of AOL in charge of the Netscape product) says in his blog that LinkedIn, which was once an “annoying distraction” has now become for him an “essential business tool”. He recounts the story of posting a job recently via LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is in the process of finalizing another venture round for $13 million, valuing the company at a reported $250 million post-financing valuation. Linkedin is projecting revenues of $45M to $60M next year and expects to hit $100M in 2008. A valuation of 5x sales is excellent (but certainly not over-inflated), and demonstrates the faith [...]

I found it fascinating that most of the blog headlines about this story focused on the negative — leaving, quitting, etc. — rather than the positive — joining. Maybe it’s me, but “quits” seems to imply that the person was unhappy where they were, which I’ve seen no indication of in this case, rather than [...]

I was introducing myself on the b5media internal forums the other day, telling a little about Linked Intelligence, and getting welcome messages from some of b5’s other 100+ bloggers. The response from Jul (Veggie Chic, This non-American Life) was hilarious, and I think typical of how many bloggers are feeling about LinkedIn these days:
I was [...]

LinkedIn Quote of the Day:
LinkedIn is like MySpace for the business-school set. Instead of bad poetry, friend lists and beer-pong photos, users post resumes, resumes, and, uh, resumes. Like other social networks, however, it does feature testimonials.
- Matthew Creamer in Advertising Age, “Social Network Says Julie Roehm’s Headed to Manhattan“, on the ouster of Wal-Mart [...]

Somehow, in the move over to the b5media servers, my comments have become mysteriously disabled. I’ve looked, they’ve looked, and it’s just non-obvious. Since we’re going to be switching the whole template soon anyway, we’ve opted not to try to track it down any further, so comments on the blog are going to be disabled [...]

As Jeff Barr, Lead Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, just noticed, one of the cool features LinkedIn has added recently is the ability to make your LinkedIn profile not only accessible to the public, but also to make an easy-to-remember unique URL (linkedin.com/in/scottallen vs. linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=2369). Here’s an illustrated step-by-step how-to:

If Dr. Seuss were alive today and a member of LinkedIn, I wonder what an invitation from him might have looked like. I’m thinking something like this:
When you’re looking for that person
Who can make a job connection,
Or someone who’s an expert in
Inflection or convection,
Or maybe you are headed on a
Trip to Machu Pichu
And you want [...]

There was a great write-up of LinkedIn in Business 2.0/CNN this week:
A MySpace for grown-ups
It reiterated the theme of just how essential a business tool LinkedIn is becoming (see LinkedIn or Locked Out):
“For many, it’s become irresponsible to not invite business associates into your LinkedIn network,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, [...]