Linked Intelligence

No official announcement from LinkedIn yet, but according to his personal blog, Yahoo! Director of User Experience Kevin Bury is leaving Yahoo! and going to LinkedIn:
On April 14th I’ll be starting my new gig as Principal Designer at LinkedIn. I’ve been a huge fan of LinkedIn for years. The potential seems enormous and I [...]

In my recent post, Getting to Know the Folks at LinkedIn, I made this statement:
What’s clear to me from my conversations with Steve and Mario, as well as past conversations with Patrick Crane and others, plus looking at the latest new features from LinkedIn, is that the main customers they are listening to right [...]

Since I don’t live in Silicon Valley and don’t attend a lot of tech conferences, I haven’t previously had a chance to meet any of the people at LinkedIn in person. But I attended SXSW a couple of weeks ago and had the pleasure of meeting Steve Ganz (right), Principal Web Developer at LinkedIn, [...]

The big buzz in social networking last week was that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has finally joined LinkedIn (as an interesting aside, he was previously the most searched-for name on LinkedIn). This seems especially surprising since Microsoft made a substantial investment in Facebook last year.
It all started with a report last month in British [...]

Educational Value of Social Media
Adam Metz presents the value proposition for social media for educators and some tips for how early adopters can “sell it” to their team. Interesting factoid regarding LinkedIn:
“Education management is one of the top five fastest growing segments on our network,” said LinkedIn’s director of corporate communications, Kay Luo. The [...]

Yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News features an interview and bio of LinkedIn cofounder and VP of Product Strategy Allen Blue, discussing LinkedIn’s outlook for 2008, particularly their strategy regarding advertising on the site:
When we think about advertising, we think about advertising as a mechanism to bring value to users. LinkedIn is a tool for [...]

LinkedIn doesn’t record age and gender information in their profiles, and if they’ve ever done a demographic survey that included it, they’ve been tight-lipped about publishing that information. But some new social networking user statistics from reputation service Rapleaf revealed some rather startling results.

Last week TechCrunch reported a rumor that LinkedIn was in buyout talks with media conglomerate News Corp, owners of, among other things, MySpace. The next day, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman responded with a "no comment", but as TechCrunch writer Mike Butcher pointed out:
But I’ll leave you with this thought: companies entertaining a sale, or [...]

The Danger of LinkedIn Addiction
Ray van den Bel, who I applaud for trying to reclaim the term “open networker” from meaning, “I’ll link with anybody,” tells of his experience shifting from a quantity focus on LinkedIn to a quality focus. This is a must-read.
There are quite a number of really addicted networkers now who are [...]

In case you’ve been wondering how to get some cool LinkedIn swag, the LinkedIn Store is now open for business. In it you can find:

T-shirts
Backpacks
Gel pens
Microfleece vests and jackets
Caps

Not a bad start. The prices are fine, and I really like the pens.
But isn’t LinkedIn a business network? Are you going to wear a T-shirt [...]