In response to my open query about whether LinkedIn actually matters, Scott Allen over at LinkedIntelligence points out that there are many people who are getting hired through LinkedIn.

Scott makes a good point — LinkedIn certainly hasn’t grown its user base by being useless. Users are certainly deriving some value from being on LinkedIn, or they simply wouldn’t be on LinkedIn.

Yet what I see happening (and this of course, is highly unvalidated and subjective) is that there is a growing middle market on LinkedIn — users that have joined and now aren’t quite sure where to go with their LinkedIn experience.

There are certainly people who have used LinkedIn and Jobster profiles in innovative ways, but that knowledge doesn’t really seem to filter down to the average user.

LinkedIn has its share of ’superusers’ who have hundreds of contacts and have devoted the time it takes to build up such an impressive network.

But for the rest of us, perhaps LinkedIn could:

1. Provide suggestions for how to use your contacts when you sign up for LinkedIn.

This would provide newbies with a brief primer on what to do with the connections they make. The LinkedIn folks are certainly the most familiar with what to do with LinkedIn, so would be in the best position to suggest what we could do with our connections.

2. Point users to external resources.

Sites like LinkedIntelligence provide great resources on LinkedIn (as did Guy Kawasaki’s post on ways to use LinkedIn), so why not point to external resources that users could take advantage of?

3. Provide discussion on what to do with LinkedIn connections.

Why not have a forum, wiki or other method to post ideas about using LinkedIn profiles and connections in innovative ways? There’s certainly no shortage of great ideas for how to use LinkedIn, so why not provide users with an open way to get at those existing ideas.

LinkedIn is a great online networking tool (heck, you could even argue it’s the online networking tool), and I think the LinkedIn team has a great opportunity to provide a bit more guidance to their growing user base.

And while I certainly haven’t devoted the time to LinkedIn that I’d like to, I know I’ve certainly made some great connections through it.

TechCrunch has posted about something on the Yahoo Widgets blog “where they talk about the pros and cons of the four major desktop widget platforms offered by Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Apple”.

Widgets can certainly add a degree of functionality to an otherwise pretty functionless space, which is nice. And also, they sure look cool.

Part of the growing problem with widgets (or ‘Gadgets’, as Microsoft likes to call them in Vista) will surely be exchanging information across different widget-makers’ widgets.

It seems that any technology that becomes sufficiently popular runs into this problem — the more disparate solutions that arise, the harder it is to get them to work together.

While it seems that all of Yahoo’s widgets actually work on Vista, it still doesn’t help with getting information that is held in one application, widget or platform into another.

Calendaring is always particularly complicated.

I want a desktop calendar widget that will show me my calendar on my home desktop, show on the web when I’m not at home, show on my desktop at work, and it must also play nice with my Lotus Notes calendar (where most of my calendar entries live).

I originally tried to get the Google Calendar to accept my Lotus Notes entries so I could view it at work — with no luck (if anyone else has figured this out, I’m very impressed). Instead, I just send the entries to my Nokia 6265i through Bluetooth. But it would be nice to have something at home.

I’d also like to see widgets that allowed people to collaborate using the same web-enabled widget in real time — while I haven’t seen this yet, it certainly doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If anyone knows of anything like this, please let me know.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has just reported that LinkedIn has raised another $12.8 million, raising their total take in recent financing to around $26 million.

When LinkedIn went public in December 2006, they were valued at around $200 million, with a revenue in 2006 of about $10 million.

Rumour is that LinkedIn is now valued at around $250 million.

A little while ago, I posted an open suggestion to anyone who was interested that they could send me an email to connect on LinkedIn.

I got a few responses to that suggestion, but after connecting with a few people, most of them then asked what they should do with all of their LinkedIn connections. Good question.

So what is the real value of LinkedIn? Sure, making your profile prettier might be fun for some, but what are you really supposed to do with all those contacts (Guy Kawasaki did come up with 10 ways to use LinkedIn, however)?

LinkedIn sure seems to be the thing to do for anyone in any job that involves information, networking, collaboration or knowledge sharing (yes, which is potentially any job).

And while LinkedIn is certainly making a profit, are they providing real tangible value? I mean, when was the last time you got a job or hired someone through LinkedIn?

It’s starting to seem like everyone under the sun is starting a social networking site. Much like blogs, most sites seem to grow and thrive in a niche — but the question is, are these sites just a fad?

Perhaps if Jobster and Facebook end up hooking up, LinkedIn will have to provide some more innovative ways to use those LinkedIn contacts.

If you have a blog (or are just an interested blog reader), you’ve surely heard of Technorati.

It’s a bit of a strange mix between an information-sharing tool and a popularity contest — blogs compete for ranking based on the number of incoming links they have.

I waste all kinds of time just watching the list of the top 100 most popular blogs.

After checking my Technorati ranking yet again (it’s not that impressive, don’t get too excited about it), I started to wonder, how does this ranking actually work?

Almost immediately, I discovered Technorati’s official explanation of what the numbers in your ranking mean. But I wasn’t really satisfied with that explanation — I still wanted to know more about it.

So then I came across Stuart Brown’s in-depth explanation of Technorati rankings, and how you basically need an ever-increasing proportion of links to get into the top 10 or top 100 blogs (which reminds me a bit of the Google PageRank myths that I wrote about yesterday).

Here’s Stuart’s graph describing links versus ranking:

Interesting. I guess Technorati instituted a new ranking system last fall, which is apparently kind of a secret.

It appears to me that links within Technorati are not weighted — that a link from a #10-ranked blog and #100-ranked blog are worth the same to Technorati. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Also, here’s a weird way someone unintentionally had their Technorati ranking increase dramatically.

And finally, why not add this blog to your Technorati favourites? I’m curious to see if an increase in favourites has any impact on overall ranking within Technorati.

So it looks like Google and YouTube are in talks to start sharing advertising revenue with people that post videos on YouTube. At this point, YouTube has about 70 million users a month.

It’s good to see that Google has noticed that people usually share videos to get a reaction — but as there is no monetary incentive at the moment to share, there’s not really any other reason to share at the moment.

YouTube has had (and is surely going to have in the future) its challenges in terms of staying open while simultaneously figuring out ways to protect copyrights and make money. Here’s YouTube founder Chad Hurley talking about how content owners are going to get their financial share of copyrighted music published in videos (credit goes to The Blogging Times for me coming across this video).

This might be a mixed blessing for content creators and YouTube alike. Certainly, part of what has made YouTube so successful is its open model (which is also a profitless model).

The current discussions about inserting a short ad at the beginning of video may prove to drive some users away, but what has ultimately made Google’s advertising model is the contextual nature of ads. If Google finds a way to target the ads shown to users, rather than just showing generic advertising, their push to monetize YouTube will surely meet with greater success.

On a somewhat related note (well, OK, it’s only related because it’s about Google), here is a very useful list of the Top 10 Google Myths Revealed. Good reading for anyone with a site who wants to understand a little more about Google and how PageRank words.

My friend Marios Alexandrou (whose blog I read regularly) has recently launched SearchGrit, a one-stop resource for all things related to search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Marios has been a tremendous help to me with getting this blog search engine-optimized.

After putting his suggestions in place, I’ve really noticed some substantial bumps in traffic. Since he’s been such a big help, I thought I’d give his new site a plug.

If you have a site or blog and want to boost your search engine on search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN, I’d highly suggest checking out SearchGrit.

You can even get your blog reviewed for free for search engine optimization, and all you have to do is put a link back to SearchGrit on your site.

I came across this brilliant piece of speculative Web 2.0 corporate art on Matthew Stibbe’s blog (which he apparently came across on Steve Rubel’s site, Micro Persuasion).

They remind me a little bit of these Web 2.0 icons. Or maybe it’s just the shininess.

While this is a lighthearted take on some corporate logos, there are some real questions here: what will Web 2.0 mean, not only for corporations, but for businesses of all sizes?

How much of an impact have Web 2.0 technologies had in our lives up until now? And is there a clear way to distinguish a Web 1.0 technology from a 2.0 technology?

The same Matthew Stibbe who posted these logos also posted a little while ago about how, despite his reluctance to completely adopt the term ‘Web 2.0′, he felt that the way he works and interacts with technology has changed.

Whether we call it Web 2.0 or not, it’s difficult to argue that the interactivity and growing omnipresence of web information and services doesn’t have an impact on the way we live.

And in case you’re wondering, my favourite logo of the bunch has to be the ‘Pfizr’ logo with the word ‘beta’ beside it. Beta medication, now there’s a scary thought.

And you have to admit, ‘Quakr 2.0ats’ is just hilarious.

I came across an article in the Globe and Mail today about the growing trend for small businesses to hire ’software as a service’ (SaaS) firms to deal with repetitive tasks like customer transactions.

And according to ZDNet, SaaS is going to be a 2.44 billion dollar industry in 2007, with Britain, France the US and Germany being the biggest consumers of these solutions.

Phil Wainewright from ZDNet’s also collected some predictions on what the future holds for SaaS. Even Microsoft’s interested in software as a service.

So what does all of this service-oriented technology really mean? Well, one way of looking at it is that software is a relatively new product — and is thus going through the same degree of service-oriented revamping that other products have already went through.

Continue reading »

Bruce Neubauer of the University of South Florida has posted an open question on YouTube about knowledge management and modeling knowledge transfer.

This is an interesting idea. Modeling knowledge transfer like you would monitor the movement of products across a shop floor (there is a relationship here, I think, to whether this is actually information or knowledge we are talking about).

Also, if we’re talking about the transfer of ideas, this seems to be very related to memetics (Hokky Situngkir argued that culture itself is a complex adaptive system — knowledge being one of the assets we acquire to make us competitive in the evolutionary arena).

I hate to answer a question with a question, but would there be any way to map this memetic/knowledge transfer problem to more of a ‘knowledge ecosystem’ type approach?

While the shop floor analogy is a good one, I think knowledge transfer might be better suited to being modeled on an ecosystem, where a need for knowledge acts as a driver, and knowlege acts as an abundant but localized resource (like water perhaps?).

How do you manage knowledge? Isn’t ‘knowledge management’ a nonsensical phrase? How can knowledge actually be managed?

In case you’ve never come across T.D. Wilson’s paper The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’, it’s well worth a read.

Wilson’s argument is basically that knowledge management is a management fad, as are other things like ‘organizational learning’, ‘customer relationship management’ and ‘business process re-engineering’.

Attached to this is the notion of the ‘knowledge worker’. If we take a look at a list of attributes a knowledge worker should have, we see that the number one attribute is being ‘knowledgeable’.

Take a careful look at that list. Does it really describe anything that would not be desirable in any worker?

Continue reading »